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A HISTORY OF CRITICISM

AND LITERARY TASTE

Ignorantium temeraria plerumque sunt judicia.
Polycarp Leyser.

A History of Criticism
AND
LITERARY TASTE IN EUROPE
FROM THE EARLIEST TEXTS TO THE PRESENT DAY
BY
GEORGE SAINTSBURY
M.A. Oxon.; Hon. LL.D. Aberd.
PROFESSOR OF RHETORIC AND ENGLISH LITERATURE IN THE
UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH
IN THREE VOLUMES
VOL. II.
FROM THE RENAISSANCE TO THE DECLINE OF
EIGHTEENTH CENTURY ORTHODOXY
SECOND EDITION
WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS
EDINBURGH AND LONDON
MCMV
v

PREFACE.

In presenting the second volume of this attempt, I feel no compunction, and offer no apology, for what may seem to some the surprisingly large space given to English critics. That the book itself is intended primarily for English readers would be but a poor-spirited plea; and the greatness of English literature as a whole, though a worthier, is still an unnecessary argument. For the fact is, that the positive value and importance of English criticism itself are far greater than has been usually allowed. Owing very mainly to the not unintelligible or inexcusable, but unfortunate, initiative of Mr Matthew Arnold, it has become a fashion to speak of this branch of our national literature, if not even of the function of the national genius which it expresses, with bated breath, and with humble acknowledgment of the superiority of German, and still more of French, critics. This superiority, I say without the slightest fear, is a fond thing vainly invented. English criticism was rather late, and for a long time rather intermittent; nor did it fail, after the manner of the nation, to derive fresh impulses and new departures in the sixteenth century from Italian, in the seventeenth and again in the nineteenth century from French, and at the end of the eighteenth from German. But it is not true that in so much as one of these cases it was contented slavishly to imitate; and it is not true that, with the doubtful exception viof Sainte-Beuve, foreign countries have had any critics greater than our own, while they have, even put together, hardly so many great ones. In everything but mere superficial consistency Dryden is a head and shoulders above Boileau as a critic; Coleridge a head, shoulders, and body above the Schlegels, whom he followed. Long before Sainte-Beuve, Hazlitt had shown a genius for real criticism, as distinguished from barren formula-making, which no critic has surpassed. And Mr Arnold himself, with less range, equity, and sureness than Sainte-Beuve, has a finer literary taste and touch. As for that general superiority of French criticism of which we have heard so much, the unerring voice of actual history will tell us that it never existed at all, except, perhaps, for a generation before 1660, and a generation before 1860, the latter being the period which called forth, but misled, Mr Arnold’s admiration. With this last we do not here deal; nor with the Romantic revolt, in dealing with which it will be pertinent to appraise the relative excellence of Lessing and Goethe as compared with Coleridge and Hazlitt. But we have within our present range an almost better field of comparison, in that “neo-classic” period from Boileau to La Harpe, and from Dryden to Johnson, in which, on the whole, and taking recognised orthodoxy only, the critics of France and of England worshipped the same idols, subscribed the same confessions of faith, and to no small extent even applied their principles to the same texts and subjects. I am, after careful examination, certain myself, and I hope that the results of that examination may make it clear to others, that they did not “order these things better in France,” that they did not order them nearly so well.

The subject of this volume has more unity than that of the last; and I have thought it permissible to avail myself of this fact in the arrangement of the Interchapters. The whole of so-called Classical or Neo-classic Criticism is so intimately connected that almost any of its characteristic documents from Vida to La Harpe might be made the text of a sermon on the viientire phenomenon in its complete development. And in the same way, though with an opposite effect, all general comment might, without any grave historical or logical impropriety, have been postponed to the end of the volume. But this would, in the first place, have broken the uniformity of the book; in the second, it would have necessitated a final Interchapter (or “inter-conclusion”) of portentous and disproportionate length; and in the third, it would have too long withheld from the reader those resting-places and intermediate views, as from various stations on Pisgah, which seem to me to be the great advantages and conveniences of the arrangement. I have therefore, while keeping the historical character and distribution of the summaries of the three centuries which happen pretty accurately to coincide with the three stages of the whole phase, made the logical gist of the first to concern chiefly the rise of the classical-critical attitude; of the second that constituted creed or code which was explicitly assented to, or implicitly accepted, by the entire period except in the case of rebels; while in the third I have concentrated criticism of this criticism as a whole. The three Interchapters are thus in manner consecutive and interdependent; but they will, I hope, serve not less to connect and illuminate the contents of the several books and of the whole volume than to conduct the story and the argument of the entire work duly from the beginning to the end of the appointed stage. They are perhaps specially important here because of the mass and number of minor figures with whom I have had to deal. I know that some excellent judges dislike this numerus and would have attention concentrated on the chiefs. But that is not my conception of literary history.

After full consideration of the matter, I have thought it better not to attempt any comment on criticisms of the first volume of this History of Criticism. I am much indebted to many of my critics, and perhaps I may be permitted to say that I was not a little surprised, and, to speak as a fool, very much pleased, by the generally favourable reception given to, rather viiithan deserved by, an undoubtedly audacious undertaking. In cases where those critics obliged me with a substantive correction (as, for instance, in that relating to Trissino’s version of the De Vulgari Eloquio, v. infra, p. 40), I have taken opportunity, wherever it was possible, to acknowledge the obligation, and I subjoin some corrigenda and addenda in a flyleaf. But beyond this I do not think it desirable to go. In the case of merely snarling or carping censure, the conduct of Johnson as regards Kenrick gives the absolute precedent, even for those who have to acknowledge how far nearer their censors have come to Kenrick than they themselves can ever hope to come to Johnson. To those who pronounce a task impossible the best answer is to go and do it; to those who object to style and manner one may once more plead those disabilities of la plus belle fille de France which attach also to those who are neither French, nor girls, nor beautiful; for those who hate jokes and literary allusions one can only pray, “God help them!” And in the case of bona fide misunderstanding the wisest thing for an author to do is to make his meaning plainer, if he can, in the rest of his book.

It would probably be still more idle to attempt to anticipate strictures on the present volume. That its subject might advantageously have been dealt with in twice or thrice the space is obvious, and perhaps I may say without impropriety that the writer could have so treated it with no additional labour except the mere writing—for the preparation necessitated would have sufficed for half-a-dozen volumes. But to keep proportion, and observe the plan, is one of those critical warnings to which Classic and Romantic alike had much better attend. In the division which I have adopted of eighteenth-century writers into those who, as adherents of Neo-Classicism, are to be treated here, and those who, as forerunners or actual exponents of Modern Criticism, are to be reserved for our next, there must necessarily be much which invites cavil, and not a little which excuses objection. I shall only say that the distribution ixhas not been made hastily; and that it may be possible to make its principle clearer when the reserved writers have been treated. The advantage of keeping the subject of the volume as homogeneous as possible seemed paramount.

In writing Vol. I. it was possible, with rare exceptions, to rely upon texts in my own possession. This has, of course, here been impossible: though I possess a fair collection of the Italians of the Renaissance, while I have long had many of the French and English writers of the whole time. For the supply of deficiencies I have not only to make the usual acknowledgment to the authorities of the British Museum—than which surely no institution ever better deserved the patronage of its name-giving goddesses—but also to thank those of the libraries belonging to the Faculty of Advocates and the Society of Writers to the Signet in Edinburgh, which bodies admit others besides their own members with remarkable liberality. In the library of the University of Edinburgh I suppose I may consider myself at home; but I owe cordial thanks to Bodley’s Librarian, to the University Librarian at Cambridge, and to the librarian of the John Rylands collection at Manchester, for information about books which I have been unable to find elsewhere. There are one or two mentioned in the notes which I have not been able to get hold of yet; and I shall be extremely obliged to any reader of this history who may happen to know their whereabouts, and will take the trouble to tell me of it.

I am only the Satan of this journey across Chaos, and I daresay I have been driven out of the best course by the impact of more than one nitrous cloud. In other words, I not merely daresay, but am pretty sure, that I have made some blunders, especially in summary of readings not always controllable by reference to the actual books when the matter came before me again in print. And I daresay, further, that these will be obvious enough to specialists. I have found some such blunders even in the first volume, where the literature of the subject was far less extensive and, even in proportion to its extent, far more xaccessible; and I have thought it best to include corrections of some of these in the present volume, in order that those who already possess the first may not be in an inferior position to those who acquire the new edition of it which is, or will shortly be, ready. When the work reaches its close (if it ever does so) will be the proper time to digest and incorporate these alterations as Fortune may allow. The kindness of Professor Elton, King Alfred Professor of English in University College, Liverpool, of Professor Ker iterum, and of my colleague Mr Gregory Smith, has beyond all doubt enabled me to forestall some part of these corrections in regard to the present volume. These friends were obliging enough to undertake between them the reading of the whole; others have assisted me on particular points, in regard to most of which I have, I think, made due acknowledgment in the notes. As before, I have taken some trouble with the Index, and I hope it may be found useful.

GEORGE SAINTSBURY.

Edinburgh, September 1902.

xi

ADDENDA AND CORRIGENDA TO VOLUME II.

P. 23 sq. A reference of Hallam’s (Literature of Europe, iii. 5, 76, 77) to the Miscellanies of Politian has led some critics, who apparently do not know the book itself, and have not even read Hallam carefully, to object to its omission here. Their authority might have saved them; for he very correctly describes these Miscellanies as “sometimes grammatical, but more frequently relating to obscure customs and mythological allusions.” In other words, the book—which I have read—is hardly, in my sense, critical at all.

P. 80, note. When I wrote on Castelvetro I was not aware that the Commentary on Dante (at least that on Inf., Cantos i.-xxix.) had been recovered and published by Signor Giovanni Franciosi (Modena, 1886) in a stately royal 4to (which I have now read, and possess), with the owl and the pitcher, but without the Kekrika, and without the proper resolution in the owl’s countenance. This may be metaphysically connected with the fact that the editor is rather unhappy about his author, and tells us that he was long in two minds about sending him out at last to the world. He admires Castelvetro’s boldness, scholarship, intellect; but thinks him sadly destitute of reverence for Dante, and deplores his “lack of lively and cheerful sense of the Beautiful.” If it were not that my gratitude to the man who gives me a text seals my mouth as to everything else, I should be a little inclined to cry “Fudge!” at this. Nobody would expect from any Renaissance scholar, and least of all from Castelvetro, “unction,” mysticism, rapture at the things that give us rapture in Dante. All the more honour to him that, as in the case of Petrarch, he thought it worth while to bestow on that vernacular, which too many Renaissance scholars despised, the same intense desire to understand, the same pains, the same “taking seriously,” which he showed towards the ancients. This is the true reverence: the rest is but “leather and prunella.”

P. 107. Some time after vol. ii. was published I came across (in the catalogues of Mr Voynich, who might really inscribe on these documents for motto

“Das Unzulängliche
Hier wird’s Ereignis”)

quite a nest of Zinanos, mostly written about that year 1590, which seems to have been this curious writer’s most active time; and I bought two of them as specially appurtenant to our subject. One is a Discorso della Tragedia, appended (though separately paged and dedicated) to the author’s tragedy of Almerigo; the other Le Due Giornate della Ninfa overo del Diletto e delle Muse, all printed by Bartholi, at Reggio, and the two prose books or booklets dated 1590. The Discorso is chiefly occupied with an attack on the position that Tragedy (especially according to Aristotle) ought to be busied with true subjects only. The Giornate (which contain another reference to Patrizzi) deal—more or less fancifully, but in a manner following Boethius, which is interesting at xiiso late a date—with philosophy and things in general, rather than with literature.

P. 322, bk. IV. chap. i. I ought, perhaps, to have noticed in this context a book rather widely spread—Sorel’s De La Connaissance des Bons Livres, Paris, 1671. It contains some not uninteresting things on literature in general, on novels, poetry, comedy, &c., on the laws of good speaking and writing, on the “new language of French.” But it is, on the whole, as anybody acquainted with any part of the voluminous work of the author of Francion would expect, mainly not disagreeable nor ignorant chat—newspaper work before the newspaper.

P. 350. The opposition of the two “doctors” is perhaps too sharply put.

P. 436. I should like to add as a special “place” for Dennis’s criticism, his comparatively early Remarks on Prince Arthur and Virgil (title abbreviated), London, 1696. It is, as it stands, of some elaboration; but its author tells us that he “meant” to do things which would have made it an almost complete Poetic from his point of view. It is pervaded with that refrain of “this ought to be” and “that must have been” to which I have referred in the text; and bristles with purely arbitrary preceptist statements, such as that Criticism cannot be ill-natured because Good Nature in man cannot be contrary to Justice and Reason; that a man must not like what he ought not to like—a doctrine underlying, of course, the whole Neo-classic teaching, and not that only; almost literally cropping up in Wordsworth; and the very formulation, in categorical-imperative, of La Harpe’s “monstrous beauty.” The book (in which poet and critic are very comfortably and equally yoked together) is full of agreeable things; and may possibly have suggested one of Swift’s most exquisite pieces of irony in its contention that Mr Blackmore’s Celestial Machines are directly contrary to the Doctrine of the Church of England.

P. 546. Denina. This author is a good instance of the things which the reader sometimes rather reproachfully demands, when the writer would only too fain have supplied them. I could write more than a page with satisfaction on Denina’s Discorso sopra le Vicende della Litteratura, which, rather surprisingly, underwent its second edition in Glasgow at the Foulis press (1763), and which not only deals at large with the subject in an interesting manner, but accepts the religio loci by dealing specially with Scottish literature. But, once more, this is for a fourth volume—or even a fifth—things belonging to the Thinkable-Unthinkable.

P. 554, l. 3. For the Paragone see vol. iii. under Conti, Antonio.


xiii

CONTENTS.

BOOK IV.
RENAISSANCE CRITICISM.
CHAPTER I.
INTRODUCTORY—ERASMUS.
  PAGE
The Critical starting-point of the Renaissance. 3
Influences at work: General 4
Particular 5
Weakness of Vernaculars 6
Recovery of Ancient Criticism 6
Necessity of defence against Puritanism 7
The line of criticism resultant 7
  PAGE
Not necessarily anti-mediæval 8
But classical 9
And anti-Puritan 9
Erasmus 10
The Ciceronianus 11
The Colloquies 13
The Letters 15
Distribution of the Book 17
CHAPTER II.
EARLY ITALIAN CRITICS.
The beginnings 19
Savonarola 20
Pico, &c. 22
Politian 23
The Manto 24
The Ambra and Rusticus 25
The Nutricia 25
Their merits 26
And danger 26
Petrus Crinitus: his De Poetis Latinis 27
Augustinus Olmucensis: his Defence of Poetry 27
Paradoxical attacks on it by Cornelius Agrippa, Landi, Berni 28
Vida 29
Importance of the Poetics 30
Analysis of the piece 30
Essential poverty of its theory 34
Historical and symptomatic significance 34
The alleged appeal to reason and Nature 35
The main stream started 37
Trissino 38
Division of his Poetic 39
His critical value 40
Editors, &c., of the Poetics 41
Pazzi 41
Robortello, Segni, Maggi, Vettori 42
Theorists: Daniello 42
Fracastoro 44
Formalists: Mutio. Tolomei and classical metres 46
Others: Tomitano, Lionardi, B. Tasso, Capriano 47
Il Lasca 48
Bembo 49
xivCaro 49
Varchi 49
Minturno 51
The De Poeta 52
The Arte Poetica 55
Their value 57
Giraldi Cinthio’s Discorsi 58
On Romance 58
On Drama 59
Some points in both 59
On Satire 61
Pigna 62
Lilius Giraldus: his De Poetis Nostrorum Temporum 63
Its width of range 64
But narrowness of view 64
Horror at preference of vernacular to Latin 64
Yet a real critic in both kinds 65
Short précis of the dialogues 66
Their great historic value 68
CHAPTER III.
SCALIGER, CASTELVETRO, AND THE LATER ITALIAN CRITICS OF THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY.
Julius Cæsar Scaliger 69
The Poetic 70
Book I.: Historicus 71
Book II.: Hyle 72
Books III. and IV.: Idea and Parasceve 73
Books V. and VI.: Criticus and Hypercriticus 73
Book VII.: Epinomis 75
General ideas on Unity and the like 76
His Virgil-worship 77
His solid merits 78
Castelvetro 80
The Opere Varie 81
The Poetica 82
On Dramatic conditions 83
On the Three Unities 83
On the freedom of Epic 84
His eccentric acuteness 84
Examples: Homer’s nodding, prose in tragedy, Virgil, minor poetry 86
The medium and end of Poetry 86
Uncompromising championship of Delight 87
His exceptional interest and importance 88
Tasso and the controversies over the Gerusalemme 89
Tasso’s Critical writings 92
And position 93
Patrizzi: his Poetica 94
The Deca Istoriale 95
The Deca Disputata 96
The Trimerone on Tasso 100
Remarkable position of Patrizzi 101
Sed contra mundum 101
The latest group of sixteenth-century Critics 102
Partenio 102
Viperano 103
Piccolomini 103
Gilio 104
Mazzoni 105
Denores 106
Zinano 107
Mazzone da Miglionico, &c. 107
Summo 108
xvCHAPTER IV.
THE CRITICISM OF THE PLÉIADE.
The Rhetorics of the Transition 109
Sibilet 111
Du Bellay 112
The Défense et Illustration de la Langue Française 113
Its positive gospel and the value thereof 114
The Quintil Horatien 116
Pelletier’s Art Poétique 117
Ronsard: his general importance 119
The Abrégé de l’Art Poétique 120
The Prefaces to the Franciade 122
His critical gospel 125
Some minors 127
Pierre de Laudun 127
Vauquelin de la Fresnaye 128
Analysis of his Art Poétique 129
The First Book 130
The Second 130
The Third 132
His exposition of Pléiade criticism 133
Outliers: Tory, Fauchet, &c. 134
Pasquier: The Recherches 135
His knowledge of older French literature 136
And criticism of contemporary French poetry 137
Montaigne: his references to literature 138
The Essay On Books 140
CHAPTER V.
ELIZABETHAN CRITICISM.
Backwardness of English Criticism not implying inferiority 144
Its cause 145
The influence of Rhetoric and other matters 146
Hawes 146
The first Tudor critics 147
Wilson: his Art of Rhetoric 149
His attack on “Inkhorn terms” 149
His dealing with Figures 150
Cheke: his resolute Anglicism and anti-preciosity 151
His criticism of Sallust 152
Ascham 153
His patriotism 154
His horror of Romance 154
And of the Morte d’Arthur 155
His general critical attitude to Prose 156
And to Poetry 156
The craze for Classical Metres 157
Special wants of English Prosody 157
Its kinds—  
    (1) Chaucerian 158
    (2) Alliterative 158
    (3) Italianated 159
Deficiencies of all three 159
The temptations of Criticism in this respect 160
Its adventurers: Ascham himself 160
Watson and Drant 161
Gascoigne 162
His Notes of Instruction 163
Their capital value 164
Spenser and Harvey 165
The Puritan attack on Poetry 169
Gosson 169
The School of Abuse 170
Lodge’s Reply 170
Sidney’s Apology for Poetry 171
Abstract of it 172
Its minor shortcomings 174
And major heresies 175
The excuses of both 175
And their ample compensation 176
King James’s Reulis and Cautelis 176
Webbe’s Discourse 178
Slight in knowledge 179
But enthusiastic 180
If uncritical 180
In appreciation 182
Puttenham’s (?) Art of English Poesie 182
xviIts erudition 183
Systematic arrangement 184
And exuberant indulgence in Figures 185
Minors: Harington, Meres, Webster, Bolton, &c. 186
Campion and his Observations 187
Daniel and his Defence of Rhyme 189
Bacon 191
The Essays 192
The Advancement of Learning 192
Its denunciation of mere word-study 193
Its view of Poetry 194
Some obiter dicta 194
The whole of very slight importance 195
Stirling’s Anacrisis 196
Ben Jonson: his equipment 197
His Prefaces, &c. 198
The Drummond Conversations 199
The Discoveries 200
Form of the book 203
Its date 204
Mosaic of old and new 204
The fling at Montaigne 205
At Tamerlane 206
The Shakespeare Passage 206
And that on Bacon 206
General character of the book 208
INTERCHAPTER IV. 211
BOOK V.
THE CRYSTALLISING OF THE NEO-CLASSIC CREED.
CHAPTER I.
FROM MALHERBE TO BOILEAU.
The supplanting of Italy by France 240
Brilliancy of the French representatives 241
Malherbe 242
The Commentary on Desportes 244
What can be said for his criticism 246
Its defects stigmatised at once by Regnier 247
His Ninth Satire 247
The contrast of the two a lasting one 249
The diffusion of seventeenth century criticism 250
Vaugelas 251
Balzac 252
His Letters 252
His critical Dissertations 253
Ogier and the Preface to Tyr et Sidon 254
Chapelain: the hopelessness of his verse 257
The interest of his criticism 257
The Sentiments de l’Académie sur le Cid 258
Prefaces 259
Sur les Vieux Romans 260
Letters, &c. 261
Corneille 261
The Three Discourses 263
The Examens 263
La Mesnardière—Sarrasin—Scudéry 264
Mambrun 266
Saint-Evremond 268
His critical quality and accomplishment 269
His views on Corneille 270
On Christian subjects, &c. 270
On Ancients and Moderns 270
Gui Patin—his judgment of Browne 272
Tallemant, Pellisson, Ménage, Madame de Sévigné 273
The Ana other than Ménage’s, especially 274
The Huetiana 275
Valesiana 275
Scaligerana 276
And Parrhasiana 276
Patru, Desmarets, and others 277
Malebranche 279
xvii
The history of Boileau’s reputation 280
The Art Poétique 281
Its false literary history 281
Abstract of it 282
Critical examination of it 286
Want of originality 287
Faults of method 287
Obsession of good sense 288
Arbitrary proscriptions 289
Boileau’s other works 290
The Satires 290
The Epigrams and Epistles 292
Prose—The Héros de Roman; the Réflexions sur Longin 292
The “Dissertation on Joconde 293
A “Solifidian of Good Sense” 295
The plea for his practical services 296
Historical examination of this 296
Concluding remarks on him 299
La Bruyère and Fénelon 300
The “Des Ouvrages de l’Esprit” 301
General observations 302
Judgments of authors 303
Fénelon. The Dialogues sur l’Eloquence 305
Sur les Occupations de l’Académie Française 306
And its challenge to correctness 307
The Abbé D’Aubignac 309
His Pratique du Théâtre 309
Rapin 310
His method partly good 311
His particular absurdities as to Homer in blame 311
As to Virgil in praise 312
As to others 313
The reading of his riddle 313
Le Bossu and the Abstract Epic 314
Bouhours 315
Encyclopædias and Newspapers 316
Bayle 316
Baillet 317
The ethos of a Critical Pedant 318
Gibert 319
The Ancient and Modern Quarrel 320
Its small critical value 321
CHAPTER II.
THE ITALIAN DECADENCE AND THE SPANIARDS.
Decadence of Italian Criticism 323
Paolo Beni 324
Possevino: his Bibliotheca Selecta 325
Tassoni: his Pensieri Diversi 326
Aromatari 328
His Degli Autori del Ben Parlare 329
Boccalini and Minors 329
Influence of the Ragguagli 330
The set of Seicentist taste 331
Spanish criticism: highly ranked by Dryden? 331
The Origins—Villena 333
Santillana 333
Encina 335
Valdés 335
The beginning of regular Criticism. Humanist Rhetoricians 336
Poetics: Rengifo 337
Pinciano 338
La Cueva 341
Carvallo 341
Gonzales de Salas 341
The Cigarrales of Tirso de Molina 343
Lope’s Arte Nuevo, &c. 344
His assailants and defenders 346
The fight over the Spanish drama 347
Cervantes and Calderon 347
Gongorism, Culteranism, &c. 349
Quevedo 349
Gracián 349
The limitations of Spanish criticism 350
xviiiCHAPTER III.
GERMAN AND DUTCH CRITICISM.
The hindmost of all 352
Origins 353
Sturm 353
Fabricius 354
Version A. 354
Version B. 354
Jac. Pontanus 355
Heinsius: the De Tragœdiæ Constitutione 356
Voss 357
His Rhetoric 358
His Poetics 359
Opitz 360
The Buch der Deutschen Poeterei 361
CHAPTER IV.
DRYDEN AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES.
Dead water in English Criticism 365
Milton 365
Cowley 366
The Prefatory matter of Gondibert 367
The “Heroic Poem” 368
Davenant’s Examen 369
Hobbes’s Answer 370
Dryden 371
His advantages 372
The early Prefaces 373
The Essay of Dramatic Poesy 376
Its setting and overture 376
Crites for the Ancients 377
Eugenius for the “last age” 378
Lisideius for the French 378
Dryden for England and Liberty 379
Coda on rhymed plays, and conclusion 380
Conspicuous merits of the piece 381
The Middle Prefaces 382
The Essay on Satire and the Dedication of the Æneis 385
The Parallel of Poetry and Painting 386
The Preface to the Fables 386
Dryden’s general critical position 386
His special critical method 387
Dryden and Boileau 389
Rymer 391
The Preface to Rapin 392
The Tragedies of the Last Age 394
The Short View of Tragedy 395
The Rule of Tom the Second 397
Sprat 398
Edward Phillips 398
His Theatrum Poetarum 399
Winstanley’s Lives 400
Langbaine’s Dramatic Poets 400
Temple 401
Bentley 401
Collier’s Short View 402
Sir T. P. Blount 404
Periodicals: The Athenian Mercury, &c. 406
INTERCHAPTER V. 407
xixBOOK VI.
EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY ORTHODOXY.
CHAPTER I.
FROM ADDISON TO JOHNSON.
Criticism at Dryden’s death 426
Bysshe’s Art of English Poetry 426
Gildon 429
Welsted 430
Dennis 431
On Rymer 432
On Shakespeare 434
On “Machines” 435
His general theory of Poetry 435
Addison 437
The Account of the Best known English Poets 438
The Spectator criticisms 440
On True and False Wit 441
On Tragedy 441
On Milton 443
The “Pleasures of the Imagination” 444
His general critical value 447
Steele 448
Atterbury 449
Swift 450
The Battle of the Books 450
The Tale of a Tub 451
Minor works 451
Pope 452
The Letters 453
The Shakespeare Preface 454
Spence’s Anecdotes 454
The Essay on Criticism 455
The Epistle to Augustus 457
Remarks on Pope as a critic 457
And the critical attitude of his group 460
Philosophical and Professional Critics 461
Trapp 462
Blair 462
The Lectures on Rhetoric 463
The Dissertation on Ossian 464
Kames 465
The Elements of Criticism 466
Campbell 470
The Philosophy of Rhetoric 470
Harris 473
The Philological Enquiries 474
“Estimate” Brown: his History of Poetry 476
Johnson: his preparation for criticism 477
The Rambler on Milton 480
On Spenser 482
On History and Letter-writing 483
On Tragi-comedy 483
“Dick Minim” 484
Rasselas 484
The Shakespeare Preface 485
The Lives of the Poets 486
Their general merits 487
The Cowley 489
The Milton 489
The Dryden and Pope 490
The Collins and Gray 491
The critical greatness of the Lives and of Johnson 493
Minor Criticism: Periodical and other 496
Goldsmith 498
Vicesimus Knox 499
Scott of Amwell 500
xxCHAPTER II.
THE CONTEMPORARIES OF VOLTAIRE.
Close connection of French seventeenth and eighteenth century Criticism: Fontenelle 501
Exceptional character of his criticism 502
His attitude to the “Ancient and Modern” Quarrel 503
The Dialogues des Morts 503
Other critical work 504
La Motte 507
His “Unity of Interest” 508
Rollin 509
Brumoy 509
Rémond de Saint-Mard 510
L. Racine 511
Du Bos 511
Stimulating but desultory character of his Réflexions 512
Montesquieu 514
Voltaire: disappointment of his criticism 515
Examples of it 515
Causes of his failure 518
Others: Buffon 519
“Style and the man” 520
Vauvenargues 521
Batteux 522
His adjustment of Rules and Taste 523
His incompleteness 524
Marmontel 525
Oddities and qualities of his criticism 526
Others 529
Thomas, Suard, &c. 529
La Harpe 530
His Cours de Littérature 530
His critical position as ultimus suorum 531
The Academic Essay 533
Rivarol 534
CHAPTER III.
CLASSICISM IN THE OTHER NATIONS.
Preliminary remarks 537
Temporary revival of Italian Criticism 538
Gravina 538
Muratori: his Della Perfetta Poesia 541
Crescimbeni 542
Quadrio 542
The emergence of literary history 545
Further decadence of Italian criticism 545
Metastasio 546
Neo-classicism triumphs in Spain 546
The absurdities of Artiga 547
Luzán 548
The rest uninteresting 549
Feyjóo, Isla, and others 549
Rise at last of German Criticism 550
Its school time 551
Classicism at bay almost from the first—Gottsched 552
The Versuch einer Critischen Dichtkunst 553
Its chief idea 553
Specimen details 555
Gellert: he transacts 557
INTERCHAPTER VI.
§ I. THE NEMESIS OF CORRECTNESS 559
§ II. THE BALANCE-SHEET OF NEO-CLASSIC CRITICISM 566

INDEX 579

BOOK IV

RENAISSANCE CRITICISM


Le materie da scienza, o da arte, o da istoria comprese, possano esser convenevoli soggetti a poesia, e a poemi, pure che poeticamente sieno trattate.Patrizzi.

3

CHAPTER I.

INTRODUCTORY—ERASMUS.

THE CRITICAL STARTING-POINT OF THE RENAISSANCE—INFLUENCES AT WORK: GENERAL—PARTICULAR—WEAKNESS OF VERNACULARS—RECOVERY OF ANCIENT CRITICISM—NECESSITY OF DEFENCE AGAINST PURITANISM—THE LINE OF CRITICISM RESULTANT—NOT NECESSARILY ANTI-MEDIÆVAL, BUT CLASSICAL AND ANTI-PURITAN—ERASMUS—THE ‘CICERONIANUS'—THE ‘COLLOQUIES’—THE ‘LETTERS’—DISTRIBUTION OF THE BOOK.

We saw, in the second section of the Interchapter which served as Conclusion to the first volume of this work, to what a point The Critical starting-point of the Renaissance. the Middle Ages had brought the materials and the methods of Literary Criticism, and what the new age with its combined opportunities might have done. We also endeavoured to indicate generally, and so to speak, proleptically, what it did not do. It is now time to examine what it did: and in the course of the examination to develop the reasons, the character, and the consequences, both of its commission and of its abstention.[1]

If no period has ever been more guilty of that too usual 4injustice to predecessors which we noted, it is fair to acknowledge that none had greater temptations to such injustice. The breach between the Classical and the Dark Ages had been almost astonishingly gradual—so gradual that it has needed no great hardiness of paradox to enable men to deny that there was any breach at all. On the other hand, though the breach at the Renaissance[2] is capable of being, and has sometimes been, much exaggerated; though it was preceded by a considerable transition period, and though mediæval characteristics survived it long and far, yet the turning over of the new leaf is again incontestable, and was as necessary in the order of thought as it is certain in the sequence of fact.

It is not much more than a hundred years since the French Revolution, a single event in one department only of things Influences at work: General. actual, was sufficient to precipitate a change which is only less—which some would hold likely to be not less—than the change at the beginning of the Dark Ages, and the change at the end of the Middle. At the Renaissance, not one but three or four such events, in as many different departments, brought their shock to bear upon the life and mind of Europe. The final disappearance of the Eastern Empire, and the apparent—perhaps, indeed, a little more than apparent—danger of a wide and considerable barbarian invasion of even Western Europe, with the balancing of this after a sort a little later by the extinction of the Moorish power in Spain, coincided, as regards politics, with a general tendency throughout Europe towards the change of feudal into centralised monarchy. The determination (resulting no doubt from no single cause, and taking effect after long preparation) of direct, practical, and extensive study to the Classics, especially to Greek, affected not merely literature, but almost everything of which literature treats. The invention of printing enormously facilitated, not merely the study but, the diffusion and propagation of ideas and patterns. The discovery of America, and of the sea-route to the East, excited that spirit of exploration and adventure which, once aroused, is sure 5not to limit itself to the material world. And, lastly, the long-threatened and at last realised protest against the corruptions of the Christian Church, and the domination of the Pope, unsettled, directly or indirectly, every convention, every compromise, every accepted doctrine. In fact, to use the words of one of the greatest of English writers,[3] in what is perhaps his most brilliant passage, “in the fabric of habit which they had so laboriously built for themselves, men could remain no longer.”

Their critical habits, as we have seen sufficiently in the last Book, had been mainly negative; and for this reason, if for no other, a considerable critical development would have been certain to spring up. But there were other reasons, and powerful ones. In the first place, the atmosphere of revolt which was abroad necessarily breeds, or rather necessarily implies, criticism. A few, whom the equal Jove has loved, may be able to criticise while acquiescing, approving, even loving and strenuously championing; but this equity is not exceedingly common, and the general tendency of acceptance, and even of acquiescence, is distinctly uncritical. On the other hand, the rebel is driven either to his rebellion by the exercise of his critical faculty, or to the exercise of his critical faculty in order to justify his rebellion. I do not myself hold that the Devil was the first critic. I have not the slightest desire to serve myself and my subject heirs to that spirit unfortunate; but I recognise the necessity of some argument to rebut the filiation.

And that these generalities should become particular in reference to Literary Criticism more especially, there were additional and momentous inducements of two different kinds. Particular. In the first place, the malcontents with the immediate past must in any case have been drawn to attack the literary side of its battlements, because of their extreme weakness. Everywhere but in the two extremities of the West, Italy and Scotland (the latter, owing to the very small bulk of its literary production, and the rudimentary condition of its language, being hardly an exception at all), the fifteenth century, even with a generous eking from the earliest sixteenth, had been a time of literary torpor and literary decadence, relieved 6only by a few—a very few—brilliant individual performances. In England the successors of Chaucer, not content with carrying his method and his choice of subject no further, had almost incomprehensibly lost command of both. In France the rhétoriqueur school of poets had degenerated less in form, but had been almost equally unable to show any progress, or even any Weakness of Vernaculars. maintained command, of matter. Germany was far worse than either. If Chaucer himself could criticise, indirectly but openly, the faults of the still vigorous and beautiful romance—of the romance which in his own country was yet to boast Chester in verse and Malory in prose—how much more must any one with sharp sense and sound taste, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, have been tempted to apply some similar process to the fossilised formalism of rondeau and ballade; to the lifeless and lumbering allegory of the latest “Rose” imitations; to the “aureate,” or rather tinselled, bombast of Chastellain and Robertet?

But, as it happened, no inconsiderable part of the newly disinterred classics dealt with this very subject of Literary Criticism, Recovery of Ancient Criticism. and, having been most neglected, was certain to be most attended to. Later mediæval practice had provided the examples of disease: earlier classical theory was to provide the remedy. Plato, the most cherished of the recovered treasures, had—in his own peculiar way, no doubt—criticised very largely; the Poetics and the Rhetoric were quickly set afresh before the new age in the originals; Horace had always been known; Quintilian was, since Rhetoric had not yet fallen into disfavour, studied direct;[4] and, before the sixteenth century was half over, Longinus himself had been unearthed and presented to a world which (if it had chosen to attend thereto) was also for the first time furnished with Dante’s critical performance.[5] With such an arsenal; with such a disposition of mind abroad; and with such real or imagined enemies 7to attack, it would have been odd if the forces of criticism, so long disorganised, and indeed disembodied, had not taken formidable shape.

There was, however, yet another influence which is not very easy to estimate, and which has sometimes perhaps been not quite rightly estimated, but which undoubtedly had a great deal to do with the matter. Necessity of defence against Puritanism. Almost as soon as—almost before indeed—the main battle of the Renaissance engaged itself, certain phenomena, not unusual in similar cases, made their appearance. Men of letters, humanists, students, were necessarily the protagonists of revolt or reform. There had always, as we have seen, been a certain jealousy of Letters on the part of the Church; and this was not likely to be lessened in the new arrangement of circumstance. But the jealousy was by no means confined to the party of order and of the defence. It had been necessary, or it would have had no rank-and-file, for the attack to enlist the descendants of the old Lollards and other opponents of the Romish Church in different countries. But in these, to no small extent, and in men like Calvin, when they made their appearance, perhaps still more, the Puritan dislike of Art, and of Literature as part of Art, was even more rampant than in the obscurest of obscuri viri on the Catholic and Conservative side. And so men of letters had not merely to attack what they thought unworthy and obsolete foes of literature, but to defend literature itself from their own political and ecclesiastical allies.

The line which they took had been taken before, and was no doubt partly suggested to them by Boccaccio in the remarkable book already referred to[6]—the De Genealogia Deorum—which was repeatedly printed in the early days of the press. The line of criticism resultant. There can be very little question that this anticipates the peculiar tone of what we may call anti-Platonic Platonism, which is so noticeable in the Italian critics of the Renaissance, and which was caught from them by Englishmen of great note and worth, from Sidney to Milton. The excellent historian of the subject—whom I have already 8quoted, and my indebtedness to whom must not be supposed to be repudiated because I cannot agree with him on some important points—is, I think, entirely wrong in speaking of mediæval “distrust of literature,” while the statement with which he supports this, that “popular literature had fallen into decay, and, in its contemporary form, was beneath serious consideration,”[7] is so astonishing, that I fear we must class it with those judicia ignorantium of which our general motto speaks. In his context Mr Spingarn mentions, as examples of mediæval treatment of literature, Fulgentius, Isidore, John of Salisbury, Dante, Boccaccio. What “popular” (by which I presume is meant vernacular) literature was there in the times of Fulgentius or of Isidore? Is not the statement that “popular literature had fallen into decay” in the time of Dante self-exploded? And the same may be said of Boccaccio. As for John of Salisbury, he certainly, as we have seen,[8] was not much of a critic himself; but that popular literature was decaying in his time is a statement which no one who knows the Chansons de Gestes and the Arthurian Legend can accept for one moment; while the documents also quoted supra, the Labyrinthus, the Nova Poetria, and the rest—entirely disprove any “distrust” of letters.

The truth is, with submission to Mr Spingarn, that there never was any such, except from the Puritan-religious side, and that this was by no means specially conspicuous in the Middle Ages. Not necessarily anti-mediæval, The “Defence of Poesy,” and of literature generally, which animates men so different as Boccaccio and Milton, as Scaliger and Sidney, is no direct revolt against the Middle Ages at all, but, as has been said, a discourse Pro Domo, in the first place, against the severer and more obscurantist partisans of Catholicism, who were disposed to dislike men of letters as Reformers, and literature as the instrument of Reformation; secondly, and much more urgently, against the Puritan and Philistine variety of Protestantism 9itself, which so soon turned against its literary leaders and allies. And the special form which this defence took was in turn mainly conditioned, not by anti-mediæval animus, but in part by the circumstances of the case, in part by the character of the critical weapons which men found in their new arsenal of the Classics.

Classical Criticism, as we have seen in the preceding volume, had invariably in theory, and almost as invariably in practice, confined itself wholly or mainly to the consideration of “the subject.” but classicalAlthough Aristotle himself had not denied the special pleasure of art and the various kinds of art, although Plato, in distrusting and denouncing, had admitted the psychagogic faculties thereof; yet nobody except Longinus had boldly identified the chief end of it with “transport,” not with persuasion, with edification, or anything of the kind. Accordingly, those who looked to the ancients to help them against the Obscuri Viri on the one hand, and against good Puritan folk like our own Ascham on the other, were almost bound to keep the pleasure of poetry and literature generally in the background; or, if they brought it to the front at all, to extol it and defend it on ethical and philosophical, not on æsthetic grounds. Taking a hint from their “sweet enemy” Plato, from Plutarch, and from such neo-Platonic utterances as that tractate of Plotinus, which has been discussed in its place,[9] they set themselves to prove that poetry was not a sweet pleasant deceit or corrupting influence in the republic, but a stronghold and rampart of religious and philosophical truth. and anti-Puritan.Calling in turn Aristotle to their assistance, and working him in with his master and rival, they dwelt with redoubled and at length altogether misleading and misled energy on “Action,” “Unity,” and the like. And when they did consider form it was, always or too often, from the belittling point of view of the ancients themselves in spirit, and from the meticulous point of view of Horace (who had always been known) in detail. Here and there in such a man as Erasmus (v. infra), who was nothing if not sensible, we find the Gellian and Macrobian particularisms taken up with a 10really progressive twist towards inquiry as to the bearing of these particularities on the pleasure of the reader. But Erasmus was writing in the “false dawn”; the Puritan tyranny of Protestantism on the one side, and of the Catholic revival on the other, had not brought back a partial night as yet; and some of the best as well as some of the worst characteristics of the new age inclined those of his immediate successors rather than contemporaries, who adopted criticism directly, to quite different ways.

It would, however, be a glaring omission if the critical position of Erasmus himself were not set forth at some length.[10] Erasmus. Standing as he does, the most eminent literary figure of Europe on the bridge of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, nothing if not critical as he is in his general temperament, and on the textual and exegetical, if not on the strictly literary sides of the Art, one of its great historical figures—his absence from this gallery would be justly regarded as inexcusable. And if his voluminous work does not yield us very much within the more special and fully enfranchising lines of our system, it might be regarded as a sufficient answer to say that the imperfection of the vernaculars, his own concentration on particular forms of Biblical and patristic text-criticism, and that peculiar cosmopolitanism which made him practically of no country at all, served to draw him away from a practice in which he would, but for these circumstances and conditions, have certainly indulged.

It may, however, be doubted whether Erasmus would ever have made a capital figure as a purely literary critic. Very great man of letters as he was, and almost wholly literary as were his interests, those interests were suspiciously directed towards the applied rather than the pure aspects of literature—were, in short, per se rather scientific than literary proper. It is at least noteworthy that the Ciceronianus (though Erasmus was undoubtedly on the right side in it) was directed against a 11purely literary folly, against an exaggeration of one of the tastes and appetites which spur on the critic. And it is almost enough to read the Adagia and Apophthegmata—books much forgotten now, but written with enormous zest and pains by him, and received with corresponding attention and respect by two whole centuries at least—to see how much is there left out which a literary critic pur sang could not but have said.

The Ciceronianus, however, must receive a little fuller treatment, both because of its intimate connection with our subject, and because hardly any work of Erasmus, except the Colloquies, so definitely estates him in the new position of critical man of letters, as distinguished from that of philosophical or rhetorical teacher. The Ciceronianus. The piece[11] (which has for its second title De Optimo Dicendi Genere) did not appear, and could not have appeared, very early in his career. He might even, in the earlier part of that career, have been slow to recognise the popular exaggeration which, as in the other matter of the Reformation itself, struck his maturer intelligence. He glances at its genesis in divers of his letters, to Budæus, to Alciatus, and others, from 1527 onwards, and the chief “begetter” of it seems to have been the Flemish scholar, Longolius (Christophe de Longueil), who during the latter part of his short life was actually very much such a fanatic as the Nosoponus of the dialogue. This person is described by his friends Bulephorus and Hypologus as olim rubicundulus, obesulus, Veneribus et gratiis undique scatens, but now an austere shadow, who has no aspiration in life but to be “Ciceronian.” In order to achieve this distinction, he has given his days and nights wholly to the study of Cicero. The “copy” of his Ciceronian lexicon would already overload two stout porters. He has noted the differing sense of every word, whether alone or in context; and by the actual occurrence, not merely of the word itself, but of its form and case, he will be absolutely governed. Thus, if you are to be a true Ciceronian, you may 12say ornatus and ornatissimus, but not ornatior; while, though nasutus is permitted to you, both comparative and superlative are barred. In the same way, he will only pass the actual cases and numbers found in the Arpinate; though every one but, let us say, the dative plural occurs, the faithful must not presume to usurp that dative. Further, he intends to reduce the whole of Cicero to quantitative rhythm, fully specified; and in his own writing he thinks he has done well if he accomplishes one short period in a winter night. The piece begins with the characteristic Erasmian banter,—Nosoponus is a bachelor, and Bulephorus observes that it is just as well, for his wife would in the circumstances either make an irruption into the study, and turn it topsy-turvy, or console herself with somebody else in some other place,—but by degrees becomes more serious, and ends with a sort of adjustment of most ancient and many modern Latin writers to the Ciceronian point of view.

That Erasmus, with his usual shrewdness, hits the great blot of the time—the merely literal and “Capernaite” interpretation of the classics—is perhaps less surprising than that he should hit such much later crazes as the Flaubertian devotion of a night to a clause, and the still prevalent reluctance of many really literary persons to allow a reasonable analogy and extension from the actual practice of authority. It was inevitable that he should offend the pedants (from Scaliger downwards), and be attacked by them with the usual scurrility; and it is not quite certain that any but very few of his readers thoroughly sympathised with him. In this as in other matters he was not so much before his time (for the time of the wise is a nunc stans), as outside of the time of his contemporaries. But even here we see that he was still of that time as well. He has no real sympathy with the vernaculars, nor any comprehension of the fact that they are on equal literary terms with the classical tongues; and even in regard to this—even when he is vindicating the freedom of the letter—his thoughts are fixed on the letter mainly.

That it was better so, there can be no doubt. Literary criticism proper could wait: correction of the mediæval habit of indiscriminate acceptance of texts could not. And still, as it is, we 13have from Erasmus not a little agreeable material of that kind which we have sedulously gathered in the preceding volume; which, from men like him, we shall not neglect in this; but for which there will be decreasingly little and less room, both here and still more in the “not impossible” third.

Considering the very wide range in subject of the Colloquies,[12] it is not quite insignificant that literary matters have but a small place in them; there is perhaps more significance still in the nature of the treatment where it does occur. The Colloquies. The chief locus is inevitably the Convivium Poeticum, where, except the account of the feast itself, and the excellent by-play with the termagant gouvernante Margaret, the whole piece is literary, and in a manner critical. But the manner is wholly verbal; or else concerned with the very mint and anise of form. A various reading in Terence from a codex of Linacre’s; the possibility of eliding or slurring the consonantal v; whether Exilis in the Palinode to Canidia is a noun or a verb; whether the Ambrosian rhymes are to be scanned on strict metrical principles; the mistakes made by Latin translators of Aristotle,—this is the farrago libelluli. I must particularly beg to be understood as not in the least slighting these discussions. They had to be done; it is our great debt on this side to the Renaissance that it got over the doing of them for us in so many cases; they are the necessary preliminary to all criticism—nay, they are an important part of criticism itself. But they are only the rudiments.

The Concio, sive Merdardus, after an explanation of the offensive sub-title (which has less of good-humoured superiority, and more of the snappish Humanist temper, than is usual with Erasmus), declines into similar matters of reading and rendering—here in reference not to profane but to sacred literature. And the curious Conflictus Thaliæ et Barbariei, which is more dramatically arranged than most of the Colloquies, and may even have taken a hint from the French Morality of Science et Asnerye,[13] 14loses, as it may seem to us, an opportunity of being critical in the best and real kind. The antagonists exchange a good deal of abuse, which on Thalia’s part extends to some mediæval writers cited by Barbaries (among whom our poor old friend John of Garlandia rather unfairly figures), and the piece, which is short, ends with a contest in actual citation of verse—Leonine and scholastic enough on the part of Barbaries, gracefully enough pastiched from the classics on the part of Thalia. But Erasmus either deliberately declines, or simply does not perceive, the opening given for a critical indication of the charms of purity and the deformities of barbarism.

To thread the mighty maze of the Letters[14] completely, for the critical utterances to be picked up there, were more tempting than strictly incumbent on the present adventurer, who has, however, not neglected a reasonable essay at the adventure. The adroit and good-humoured attempt to soothe the poetic discontent of Eobanus Hessus, who thought Erasmus had not paid him proper attention,[15] contains, for instance, a little matter of the kind, and several references to contemporary Latin poets. The most important thing, perhaps, is the opinion—sensible as usual with the writer—that, as the knowledge of Greek becomes more and more extended, translation of it into Latin is more and more lost labour. But Erasmus, as we should expect, evidently has more at heart the questions of “reading and rendering” which fill his correspondence with Budæus and others. To take the matter in order, a curious glimpse of the literary manners, as well as the literary judgments, of the time is afforded by an enclosure in a letter to John Watson of Cambridge. Watson wanted to know what Erasmus had been doing, and Erasmus, answering indirectly, sends him a letter on the subject by one Adrian Barland of Louvain to his brother. The Letters. Some incidental expressions here about Euripides as nobilissimus poeta, and Apuleius as producing pestilentissimas facetias, are more 15valuable to us than the copious laudations of Barland on Erasmus’ own work, which pass without any “Spare my blushes!” from the recipient and transmitter. We note that the moral point of view is still uppermost, though the observations are taken from a different angle. Aristophanes would have regarded Euripides as much more “pestilent,” morally speaking, than Apuleius. The long and necessarily complimentary letter (ii. 1) to Leo the Tenth contains some praise of Politian and much of Jerome, on whom Erasmus was then engaged; and while the language of this correspondence naturally abounds in Ciceronian hyperbole, it is not insignificant that Erasmus describes the Father with the Lion as omni in genere litterarum absolutissimus, which, assuming any real meaning in it, is not quite critical, though Jerome was certainly no small man of letters. The letter to Henry Bovill (ii. 10), which contains the famous story of “mumpsimus” and “sumpsimus,” as well as the almost equally famous account of the studies of the University of Cambridge in the ninth decade of the fifteenth century, contains also a notable division of his own critics of the unfavourable kind. They are aut adeo morosi ut nihil omnino probent nisi quod ipsi faciunt; aut adeo stolidi ut nihil sentiant; aut adeo stupidi ut nec legant quod carpunt; aut adeo indocti ut nihil judicent; aut adeo gloriæ jejuni avidique ut carpendis aliorum laboribus sibi laudem parent. And their children are alive with us unto this day.

There is a very curious, half modest and severe, half confident criticism of his own verses in ii. 22. He admits that there is nothing “tumultuous” in them, “no torrent overflowing its banks,” no deinosis: but claims elegance and Atticism. It would be perhaps unfair to attach the character of deliberate critical utterance to his effusive laudation of the style of Colet in an early letter (v. 4, dated 1498, but Mr Seebohm has thrown doubt on these dates, and Mr Nichols appears to be completely redistributing them), as placidus sedatus inaffectatus, fontis limpidissimi in morem ditissimo e pectore scatens, æqualis, sui undique similis, apertus, simplex, modestiæ plenus, nihil usquam habens scabri contorti conturbati. But it is interesting, and significant of his own performances, as is the comparison (v. 19) 16of Jerome and Cicero as masters of rhetoric. The somewhat intemperate and promiscuous contempt of mediæval writing which appears in the Conflictus (vide supra) reappears, with the very same names mentioned, in an epistle (vii. 3), Cornelio Suo, of 1490, which, if it be rightly dated, must be long anterior to the Colloquy. But a much more important expression of critical opinion than any of these appears in v. 20 to Ammonius, where Erasmus gives his views on poetry at large. They are much what we should suspect or expect beforehand. Some folk, he says, think that a poem is not a poem unless you poke in all the gods from heaven, and from earth, and from under the earth. He has always liked poetry which is at no great distance from prose—but the best prose.[16] He likes rhetorical poetry and poetical rhetoric. He does not care for far-fetched thoughts; let the poet stick to his subject, but give fair attention to smoothness of versification. “Prose and sense,” in short: with a little rhetoric and versification added.

But on such matters he always touches lightly, and with little elaboration; and to see where his real interest lay we have but to turn to the above-quoted verbal discussions with Budæus on the one hand, to the minute and well-known account of More’s life and conversation given to Hutten in x. 30 on the other. Nor do I think that it is worth while to extend to the remaining two-thirds of the letters the more exact examination which has here been given to the first third or thereabouts.[17]

Once more, far be it from any reasonable person to blame Erasmus, or any of his immediate contemporaries, for not doing what it was not their chief business to do. That chief business, in the direction of criticism, was to shake off the critical promiscuousness of the Middle Ages, to insist on the importance of accurate texts and exact renderings, to stigmatise the actual 17barbarism, the mere mumpsimus, which had no doubt too often taken the place not only of pure classical Latinity, not only of the fine if not classical Latin of Tertullian and Augustine and Jerome, but of that exquisite “sport” the Latin of the early Middle Age hymns, to hammer Greek into men’s heads (or elsewhere), to clear up the confusion of dates and times and values, which had put the false Callisthenes on a level with Arrian, and exalted Dares above Homer. Even the literary beauty of the classics themselves was not their main affair;—they had to inculcate school-work rather than University work, University work rather than the maturer study of literature. Of the vernaculars it was best that they should say nothing: for except Italian none was in a very good state, and Humanists were much more likely to speak unadvisedly with their lips if they did speak on the subject. They worked their work: well were it for all if others did the same.

For the reasons given, then, Erasmus and those whom he represents[18] could do little for criticism proper; and for the Distribution of the Book. same (or yet others closely connected) the northern nations, of whom Erasmus is the most distinguished literary representative, could for a long time do as little: while some of them for a much longer did nothing at all. Of the others, the criticism of Spain, the criticism of France, and the criticism of England were all borrowed directly from that of Italy. The Spaniards did not begin till so late that their results, like those of Opitz and other Germans, cannot be properly treated till the next Book. France was stirred about the middle of the century, and England a very little later. These two countries, therefore, will properly have each its chapter in the present book. But two of much more importance must first be given to those Italian developments, in our Art or Study, on which both French and English criticism are based. The first will deal with those who write, roundly speaking, before Scaliger; the second with the work of that redoubted Aristarch, with the equally—perhaps the more—important name of Castelvetro, 18with the weary wrangle over the Gerusalemme Liberata (which, weary as it is, is the first great critical debate over a contemporary vernacular work of importance, and therefore within measure not to be missed by us), and with certain of the later Italian critical theorists, of the sixteenth and earliest seventeenth century, who are valuable, some as continuing, some as more or less ineffectually fighting against, the neo-classic domination.


1. At the beginning of Book III. I had practically no obligations to any general guide to confess; at the beginning of Book II. not very many. Here, as in the case of M. Egger in regard to Book I., I have cheerfully to acknowledge the forerunnership and help of Mr Joel Elias Spingarn, whose History of Literary Criticism in the Renaissance appeared (New York and London) in 1899. I shall have occasion to differ with Mr Spingarn here and there; and his conception of a History of Criticism is not mine, just as, no doubt, mine is not his. But the obligations of the second treader of a previously untrodden path to the first are perhaps the greatest that fall to be acknowledged in any literary task; and I acknowledge them in Mr Spingarn’s case to the fullest extent possible.

2. The complaints sometimes made as to the ambiguity and want of authority of this term may have some justification; but convenience and (by this time) usage must be allowed their way.

3. Mr Froude in the opening of his History.

4. The complete text was, as is well known, not discovered (by Poggio at St Gallen) till the fifteenth century had nearly filled its second decade, but the book had been studied long before.

5. Very great influence on sixteenth, and even on seventeenth, century criticism has also been frequently, and perhaps correctly, assigned to the grammatical works and Terentian Scholia of Donatus.

6. Vol. i. p. 457 sq.

7. Spingarn, op. cit., p. 2. On the previous page there is the equally surprising statement that in the Middle Ages “Poetry was disregarded or contemned, or was valued, if at all, for qualities that least belong to it.” What were these “qualities”?

8. Vol. i. p. 414 note

9. Vol. i. pp. 67, 68.

10. Erasmus is still only readable as a whole, or in combination of his really important literary work, in the folios of Beatus Rhenanus (8 vols., Basle, 1540-1) or Le Clerc (10 vols., Lyons, 1703-6). It is a thousand pities that this more important literary work, at least, has not been re-edited together accessibly and cheaply.

11. First printed at Basle, 1528. Besides the general editions, there are some separate reprints (e.g., Oxford, 1693). But it ought to have shared the popular diffusion of the Colloquies.

12. I use the Tauchnitz ed. (with the Encomium Moriæ) in 2 vols. (Leipsic: 1829).

13. V. E. Fournier, Théâtre Français avant la Renaissance (Paris, n. d.), p. 334 sq. It is not at all impossible that the indebtedness may be the other way. The dates of these pieces are very uncertain.

14. I use the London folio of 1642, where the letter to Hessus, the Fifth of the Twenty-sixth book, will be found at col. 1407-10. I wish Mr Nichols’ excellent rearrangement had been available. But even its first volume only appeared when this book was in the printer’s hands.

15. Hessus, it may be not superfluous to say, was one of the authors of the Epistolæ Obscurorum, and in verse one of the very best Humanists of Germany.

16. Mihi semper placuit carmen quod a prosa, sed optima, non longe recederet.—Op. cit., col. 420.

17. Those who would like to continue this may look, among many other places, at xii. 7 (praise of Politian); xv. 17 (jubilation over the confusion of Humanism); xvii. 11 (ditto to Vives); xxi. 4 (a good deal on writers both ancient and modern), and especially xxvi. 5 (above noticed).

18. See infra (pp. 27-29) on Augustinus Olmucensis (Käsenbrot) and Cornelius Agrippa.

19

CHAPTER II.

EARLY ITALIAN CRITICS.

THE BEGINNINGS—SAVONAROLA—PICO, ETC.—POLITIAN—THE ‘MANTO’—THE ‘AMBRA’ AND ‘RUSTICUS’—THE ‘NUTRICIA’—THEIR MERITS AND DANGER—PETRUS CRINITUS: HIS ‘DE POETIS LATINIS’—AUGUSTINUS OLMUCENSIS: HIS ‘DEFENCE OF POETRY’—PARADOXICAL ATTACKS ON IT BY CORNELIUS AGRIPPA, LANDI, BERNI—VIDA—IMPORTANCE OF THE ‘POETICS’—ANALYSIS OF THE PIECE—ESSENTIAL POVERTY OF ITS THEORY—HISTORICAL AND SYMPTOMATIC SIGNIFICANCE—THE ALLEGED APPEAL TO REASON AND NATURE—THE MAIN STREAM STARTED—TRISSINO—DIVISION OF HIS ‘POETIC’—HIS CRITICAL VALUE—EDITORS, ETC., OF THE ‘POETICS’—PAZZI—ROBORTELLO, SEGNI, MAGGI, VETTORI—THEORISTS: DANIELLO—FRACASTORO—FORMALISTS: MUTIO. TOLOMEI AND CLASSICAL METRES—OTHERS: TOMITANO, LIONARDI, B. TASSO, CAPRIANO—IL LASCA—BEMBO—CARO—VARCHI—MINTURNO—THE ‘DE POETA’—THE ‘ARTE POETICA’—THEIR VALUE—GIRALDI CINTHIO’S ‘DISCORSI’—ON ROMANCE—ON DRAMA—SOME POINTS IN BOTH—ON SATIRE—PIGNA—LILIUS GIRALDUS: HIS ‘DE POETIS NOSTRORUM TEMPORUM’—ITS WIDTH OF RANGE—BUT NARROWNESS OF VIEW—HORROR AT PREFERENCE OF VERNACULAR TO LATIN—YET A REAL CRITIC IN BOTH KINDS—SHORT ‘PRÉCIS’‘PRÉCIS’ OF THE DIALOGUES—THEIR GREAT HISTORIC VALUE.

It is not necessary to discuss, or even to expose at any length, the causes of the relative precocity of Italian Criticism in the Renaissance. The beginnings. They are practically all contained in, and can by the very slightest expense of learning and intelligence be extracted from, the fact that Italy was at once the cradle of Humanist study of the Classics, and the only country in Europe which possessed a fully developed vernacular. But for the greater part of the fifteenth century attention was diverted from actual criticism—except 20of the validating or invalidating kind—by the prior and eagerer appetite for the discovery, study, and popularising, by translation and otherwise, of the actual authors and texts. For a long time, indeed, this appetite showed the usual promiscuity of such affections; and it was scarcely till the time of Vittorino da Feltre that much critical discrimination of styles was introduced. But these and other kindred things came surely, and brought criticism with them, though criticism still generally of the moral and educational kind. The Boccaccian defence was taken up by various writers of note—Bruni,[19] Guarino, Æneas Sylvius—and before the close of the fifteenth century two of the greatest of Florentines had indicated in different ways the main lines which Italian criticism was to take. These two were Savonarola and Politian.

The tendency of each could be anticipated by any one who, though actually ignorant of it, knew the characteristics of the two men in other ways. Savonarola. Fra Girolamo’s, of course, is wholly ethical-religious, mainly neo-Platonic, but already presenting the effect of Aristotelian details on the general Platonic attitude to Poetry. Yet he is still scholastic in his general treatment of the subject, and still adopts that close subordination of poetry to Logic which is as old as Averroes and Aquinas, and which, odd as it may seem to merely modern readers, is a very simple matter when examined.[20] He disclaims, as usual, any attack on poetry itself, urging only the 21abuse of poetry; but he follows Plato in looking more than askance at it, and Aristotle in denying its necessary association with verse. The Scriptures are the noblest poetry; all ancient poetry is doubtfully profitable. In fact, he regards poetry altogether as specially liable to abuse, and dubiously admissible into, or certainly to be expelled from, a perfect community, such as that on which the fancy of the Renaissance was so much fixed.

Savonarola’s remarks, which are contained in his four-book tractate, De Scientiis,[21] are more curious than really important. Yet they derive some importance from the great name and influence of their propounder, from his position at the very watershed, so to speak, of time in Europe, if not in Italy, dividing Middle Age from Renaissance, and from the fact that they undoubtedly summarise that dubitative, if not utterly hostile, view of literature in general, and of poetry in particular, which, as we have seen,[22] was borrowed by the Fathers from the ancients, and very much intensified by the borrowers. Fra Girolamo’s attitude is a rigidly scholastic one; and to those who omit to take account of this, or do not understand it, his view must seem wholly out of focus, if not wholly obscure. Poetry is a part of Rational Philosophy; and therefore its object must be pars entis rationis. It differs from Rhetoric in working purely by Example, not Enthymeme. Its end is to induce men to live virtuously by decent representations; and as the soul loves harmony, it uses harmonic forms. But a poet who merely knows how to play gracefully with feet only deserves the name as an old woman deserves that of a pretty girl.[23] Still more preposterous is the habit of calling poetry “divine.” Cosmos becomes chaos, if you admit that. Scientia autem divina est cujus objectum Deus: non illa cujus objectum exemplum. The making of verses is only poetry per accidens; and as for the Heathen poets, magnus diaboli laqueus absconditus est in them. He does not, he says, actually “damn” poetry; but the gist of 22his tractatule is that poets as a rule quite misunderstand their function, and that poetry had better keep its place, and abstain from silly, not to say blasphemous, airs.

Such a point of view was, of course, liable to be taken by persons alike unlikely to assume the “know-nothing” attitude of the more ignorant Catholics, the Philistine-Puritan attitude of Protestantism, or the merely Platonic and non-Christian theory of some free-thinkers. It might well seem to thoughtful lovers of literature that its very existence was in danger when it was attacked from so many sides, and that it was necessary to intrench it as strongly as possible. Nor were the materials and the plan of the fortification far to seek. The suggestion has been rather oddly discovered in the Geographer Strabo;[24] but authorities much more germane to the matter were at hand. Boccaccio himself had, as we have seen, both taken note of the danger and indicated the means of defence: Maximus Tyrius and Plutarch, the one in a manner more, the other in a manner less, favourable to poetry, had in effect long before traced out the whole Camp of Refuge on lines suitable either to the bolder or to the more timid defender of Poesy. The latter could represent it as the philosophy of the young, as a sort of Kindergarten-keeper in the vestibule of the higher mysteries, as not necessarily bad at all, and possibly very good. The former could argue for its equality with philosophy itself, as pursuing the same ends by different means, and appealing, not in the least in forma pauperis, to its own part of human nature.

It seems by no means improbable that this view was partly brought about by that remarkable influencer both of early mediæval and of early Renaissance thought, Dionysius the Areopagite. Pico, &c. Readers of Mr Seebohm’s Oxford Reformers[25] will remember the curious and interesting 23extracts there given from Colet’s correspondence with Radulphus, and the explanation of the Mosaic cosmogony as intended to present the Divine proceedings “after the manner of a poet.” This view Colet seems to have extracted partly from Dionysius himself, partly from Pico della Mirandola, the most remarkable of Savonarola’s converts, while time and place are not inconsistent with the belief that the future Dean of St Paul’s may have come into contact with Fra Girolamo himself. Now, this kind of envisagement of poetry, certain to turn to spiritual account in spiritually minded persons like Colet and Savonarola, and in mystically, if not spiritually, minded ones like Pico, would, in the general temper of the Renaissance, of which all three were early illustrations, as certainly turn to more or less spiritualised philosophy—ethical, metaphysical, or purely æsthetic, as the case might be. And we can see in it a vera causa of that certainly excessive, if not altogether mistaken, devotion to the abstract questions, “What is a poet?” “What is poetry?” “What is drama?” and so forth, which we perceive in almost all the Italian critics of the mid-sixteenth century, and which is almost equally, if less originally, present in their Elizabethan pupils and followers. If Colet himself had paid more attention to literature, we cannot doubt that this is the line which his own literary criticism would have taken; and as his influence, direct or through Erasmus and More, was very great on English thought, both at Oxford and Cambridge, it is not impossible that it may have been exerted in this very way.

The other line (the line which, according to the definitions of the present work, we must call the line of criticism proper), though it was perhaps hardly in this instance traced with boldness and without deflection, started under yet more distinguished auspices. Politian. The Sylvæ of Politian consist, in the main, of a direct critical survey of classical poetry couched in the, as we may think, somewhat awkward form of verse, decked with all the ornament that could suggest itself to the author’s rich, varied, and not seldom really poetical fancy, and arranged with a view to actual recitation in the 24lecture-room for the delight and encouragement of actual students.[26]

Neither purpose nor method can be regarded as wholly favourable to criticism. The popular conférencier (for this term best expresses Politian’s position) is sure to be rather more of a panegyrist or a detractor, as the case may be, than of a critic; and the lecturer in verse is sure to be thinking rather of showing his own rhetorical and poetical gifts than of the strict merits and defects of his subject. But if we take the Nutricia or the Rusticus, the Ambra or the Manto, and compare any of them with the well-intentioned summary of the Labyrinthus,[27] we shall see without the least unfairness, and fully admitting the difference of ability and of opportunity in the two men, the difference, from the critical point of view, of the two stand-points.

In the “Manto,” the first of the Sylvæ, the most important characteristic of sixteenth-century Italian criticism proper, the exaltation of Virgil, is already prominent. The Manto. Politian, indeed, was too much of a wit, and too much of a poet himself, to let his Virgil-worship take the gross and prosaic form which it assumed a little later in Vida. But he has proceeded a long way from the comparatively uncritical (and yet so more critical) standpoint of Dante. He comes to details. Cicero had won the palms of sweetness from Nestor and of tempestuous eloquence from Ulysses (a little vague this), but Greece consoled herself in poetry. Ennius was too rude to give Latium the glory of that. Then came Virgil. Even with the Syracusan reed (i.e., in his Eclogues) he crushes Hesiod and contends with Homer. Calliope took him in her arms as an infant, and kissed him thrice. Manto, the guardian nymph of his native place, hailed his advent, and summarised in prophetic detail his achievements in verse. Her town shall enter the lists—secure of victory—with the seven competitors for Homer’s origin. And then a whirlwind of magniloquent peroration 25(charged with epanaphora,[28] that favourite figure of the sixteenth century) extols the poet above all poets and all wonders of the world, past, present, and to come.

But Politian would have been faithful neither to those individual qualities which have been noted in him, nor to that sworn service of Greek which was the chivalry of the true Humanist, if he had thought of depreciating Homer. The Ambra and Rusticus. The “Ambra,” a poem longer than the “Manto,” and not much less enthusiastic, is mainly devoted to a fanciful description of the youth of the poet, and a verse-summary of the poems. Indeed the peroration (till it is turned into a panegyric of Ambra, a favourite villa of Lorenzo) is a brilliant, forcible, and true indication of the enormous debt of all ancient literature, science, and in fact life, to Homer, of the universality of his influence, and of the consensus of testimony in his favour. The “Rusticus” is rather an independent description and panegyric of country life, as a preface to the reading of Virgil, Hesiod, and other bucolic and georgic writers, than a criticism or comparison of them. The Nutricia. But the “Nutricia” is again ours in the fullest sense. Its avowed argument is De poetica et poetis, and, in handling this vast and congenial theme, Politian gives the fullest possible scope at once to his genius, to his learning, and to that intense love for literature without which learning is but as the Carlylian “marine-stores.” In nearly eight hundred exultant hexameters,[29] the vigour and 26fulness of which enable them to carry off without difficulty the frippery of their occasional trappings, he traces the origin of poetry, the transition from mere stupid wonder and the miseries of barbarism to sacred and profane verse, the elaboration of its laws in Judea by David and Solomon, in Greece by Orpheus, the succession of the Greek and Latin poets in the various forms (it is noteworthy that Politian is not at all copious on the drama) through the exploits of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio to the patronage of poetry by Lorenzo himself.

This is criticism leaning dangerously on the one side to panegyric, and likely to be (though it is not actually) dragged to the other still more dangerously by partisanship; but it is still criticism. Their merits The liker does not “like grossly,” or in accordance with mere tradition. He loves, as the American poet says, “not by allowance but with personal love”; and he can give reasons for the love that is in him. He seeks the poetic pleasure from the Muse; he obtains it from her; and he savours it, not merely with eagerness, but with acutely sensitive taste. Though he might not at some moments be averse to refining on the character of poetry generally, as well as on the character of this poetic pleasure, it is this itself that he seeks, finds, and rejoices in. Part at least of the spirit of Longinus is on him; he is transported, and he knows the power that transports.

At the same time, it must be difficult, for all but the extremest Virgilians, to think that he does not err by way of excess in his estimate of that poet; and it must be still more difficult, even for them, not to perceive that the pitch, even if excusable in the individual, is dangerous as an example. and danger. Followers will make-believe; they will give inept reasons to support their made belief; and worst of all, by that fatal catachresis of “imitation” which is always waiting upon the critic, they will begin to think, and to say, that by simply copying and borrowing from Virgil and other great ones you may go near to be thought not entirely destitute of their so-much-praised charm. The danger very soon ceased to be a danger only, and we find a victim to it in Vida; but before coming to him we may divagate a little.

27The furor poeticus of Politian put him much beyond other Humanists in critical respects. His contemporary and friend, Petrus Crinitus: his De Poetis Latinis. Petrus Crinitus,[30] was, if not quite of the same caste as Politian, by no means of the mere ordinary Humanist type. His kissing-verses, Dum te Neæra savior, are among the best of their kind between Petronius and Johannes Secundus; and his curious pot-pourri, De Honesta Sapientia, is quite worth reading, though one may know most of its constituents well enough beforehand. Yet the literary inquiries here are surprisingly few, and treated in no critical spirit whatsoever, so that there is no disappointment in one sense, though there may be in another, with his three books, De Poetis Latinis. These consist of a large number of separate articles in more or less chronological order, by no means ill-written in the classical-dictionary fashion: Genitus est here; obiisse traditur there, and in such a year; totum se dicavit poeticæ facultati, and the rest. The taste as expressed by preferences is not bad, and the approaches (they are hardly more) to critical estimate, though very obvious and mostly traditional, are sound enough and fairly supported by quotation. But of original attempt to grasp and to render the character of Latin poetry generally, or of any one Latin poet by himself, there is hardly a vestige.

It is not at all improbable that Poetics in one form or another, both Italian and “Tedescan,” may exist in MSS. of this period: Augustinus Olmucensis: his Defence of Poetry. there is certainly work, even in print, of which very little notice has been taken hitherto. For instance, a few months ago my friend Mr Gregory Smith saw in a catalogue, bought, and very kindly lent to me, a Dialogus in Defensionem Poetices, printed at Venice in 1493, and written by a certain Augustinus Moravus Olmucensis.[31] 28This writer’s family name in vernacular appears to have been Käsenbrot; and he was one of the early German Humanists whose most famous chiefs were Reuchlin earlier, Conrad Celtes and Eobanus Hessus later, who achieved much tolerable verse, and in the Epistolæ Obscurorum one immortal piece of prose, but who were whelmed in the deluge of the Reformation struggles, and accomplished little of the good which they might have done to Germany. The Dialogus—which has the perhaps not quite accidental interest of having appeared in the year between the writing of Savonarola’s somewhat dubious backing of Poetry, and the first printing of Boccaccio’s uncompromising and generous championship thereof—cannot be said to be of much intrinsic importance. The author gives, or rather adopts, the definition of Poetry as “a metrical structure of true or feigned narration, composed in suitable rhythm or feet, and adjusted to utility and pleasure.” But his text is rather rambling. A parallel with Medicine (the piece seems to have been written at Padua, which helps it to its place here) is not very well worked out, and the latter part is chiefly occupied with rather dull-fantastic allegorisings of the stories of Tiresias, the Gorgons, the geography of Hades, and so forth. Still it is a sign, and welcome as such.

Another Transalpine may be admitted here, for reasons of time rather than of place, to introduce two undoubted Italians. Paradoxical attacks on it by Cornelius Agrippa, Landi, Berni. It is customary to mention the name at least of Cornelius Agrippa,[32] if not exactly as a critic, at any rate as being a denouncer, though no mean practitioner, of literature. It is perhaps a just punishment for his blasphemy that no one who only knew this would dream that the adept of Nettesheim was as good a man of letters as he is. It constitutes the fourth chapter of the De Vanitate Scientiarum (1527), and is a mere piece of hackneyed railing at the art which aures stultorum demulcet, which is architectrix mendaciorum et cultrix perversorum dogmatum, which is pertenuis et nuda, insulsa, esuriens, famelica. Alas! if some tales are true, Cornelius (who really was a clever man) 29found that Occultism could starve its votaries as well as Poetry. His attack is, in fact, nothing but an instance of that measles of the Renaissance (nor of the Renaissance only) paradox-quackery; and it has no solid foundation whatever. The later (1543) Paradossi of Ortensio Landi[33] exhibit more frankly the same spirit, but in regard to individuals, especially Aristotle, rather than to poetry and literature generally. And it is probably not absent from Berni’s Dialogo contra i Poeti[34] (1537, but written earlier), in which Poetry is dismissed by this agreeable poet as suitable enough pastime for a gentleman, but out of the question as a regular vocation or serious business.

But we must return to serious persons. Of the critical texts to which we pay chief attention in this book, there are not a few which are of far higher critical value than Vida’s Poetics.[35] Vida. But it may be doubted whether even the similarly named treatises of Aristotle and of Horace have had a greater actual influence; and I at least am nearly certain that no modern treatise has had, or has yet had a chance of having, anything like so much. In the recently renewed study of Renaissance Criticism there has been, naturally enough, a repetition of a phenomenon familiar on such occasions—that is to say, the deflection of attention from pretty well-known if half-forgotten material to material which had been still more forgotten, and was hardly known at all. Daniello, Minturno, and the rest had, since the seventeenth century, rested almost undisturbed; even Castelvetro and Scaliger had more or less shrunk to the position of authorities, of some importance, in regard to ancient criticism. But Vida, owing to the unmistakable though unacknowledged borrowing of Boileau, the franker discipleship of Pope, and the inclusion of a very characteristic translation by Pitt among the usual collections of “British Poets,” had taken rank once for all. It 30is true that it was a rank somewhat of the museum order, but it existed. Now, the critics who followed him and refined upon him have been disinterred, and are enjoying their modest second vogue; and he is comparatively neglected, though a judicious American[36] has put him in modern dress once more between his master Horace and his pupil Boileau.

Of three things, however, the one is absolutely incontestable as a fact, and the other two are not easily, I think, to be gainsaid by competent authority. Importance of the Poetics. The first is, that Vida anticipates in time even the earliest of the prose critics of the new Italian school by some couple of years, while he anticipates the main group of these critics by more than twenty. The second is, that though no doubt he took some impulse from Politian and other Humanists, he is practically the first to codify that extravagant Virgil-worship which reigned throughout the Neo-Classical dispensation. The third is that, not merely in this point but in others, he seems, by a sort of intuition, to have anticipated, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, almost the whole critical orthodoxy of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth. It is this which makes the translation of him by Pitt so interesting; because the translator is, for once, no traitor, but plus royaliste que le roi—fanatically imbued with the principles, and equipped to the finger-tips with the practice, of his original. But for the purposes of the scholar that original itself must of course be taken.

The temper and the faith in which Vida writes are made manifest by the very beginning of his poem—an invocation to the Muses woven of unexceptionable gradus-tags, and deftly dovetailed into a dedication to the luckless Dauphin Francis, who had then taken his father’s place as Charles the Fifth’s prisoner at Madrid, and to whose captivity the poem is modestly offered as a solace or pastime. Analysis of the piece. These invocations accomplished more majorum, Vida proceeds to occupy his First Book with a sort of general clearing of the ground. He is ready to teach the secret of all kinds of poetry; but the poet must very carefully inquire what are the kinds to which he himself 31is best adapted and best inclined. Commissioned work is dubious, unless under a king’s command. But there is more than this: the poetic child must be carefully nursed in the arts suitable to his great calling. He must be as carefully guarded from the taint of vulgar and incorrect speech; and must be regularly initiated into Poetry—Latin first, especially Virgil, and then Greek, especially Homer. A short historical sketch of poetry follows; but it, like everything else, is brought round to the deification of the Mantuan. Hence Vida (who must be pronounced rather long in weighing anchor) diverges to a good-natured intercession with parents and teachers not to have the boys whipped too much, telling a moving legend of an extremely pretty[37] boy who was actually whipped to death, or at least died of fear. Emulation, however, is quite a good stimulus; and by degrees work will be loved for itself. But original poetical production must not be attempted too young; there must be time for play; the rudiments of metre and so forth must be thoroughly learnt; and, above all, non omnes omnia must be constantly kept in mind. It is better to begin with pastorals and minor subjects; solitude and country life are very desirable circumstances. And so Book I. closes with a fresh invocation of the spirit of poetry and a fresh celebration of its power.

After this rather ample prelude the author somewhat unreasonably (seeing that the delay has been his own doing), but in coachmanlike fashion, says Pergite! Pierides, and proposes to unfold the whole of Helicon to coming ages. The first disclosure is scarcely novel. You must invoke Jove and the Muses; nor will one Invocation do. When in doubt always invoke.[38] Next you should, without holding out bombastic promises, allure your reader by a modest but sufficient description of the subject of your poem. So far the method of turning the practice of the ancients into a principle is impartially adjusted to Homer and Virgil alike; but after a few score verses the partisan appears. The beginnings of the 32Iliad and the Odyssey, the plunging into the midst of things with the wrath of Achilles, and the sojourn with Calypso, instead of the rape of Helen (why not of Hesione?) or the launching from Troy, are duly praised. But the elaborate Homeric descriptions—as that of the car—are boggled at; the introduction of Thersites shocks Vida (Drances seems a far nobler figure), and the pettiness of the subjects of some of the Homeric similes would never suit the magniloquence of the Latian Muse.[39] In Virgil, on the other hand, he can see no fault; even the demand of Venus for arms to clothe her bastard son, which had given qualms to admirers of old, does not disturb Vida at all; and his poem seems to be slipping by degrees into a mere précis of the Æneid, that each trait actually found in Virgil may be registered as a pattern to poets generally. He wrenches himself free for a moment to inculcate the following of nature; but presently lapses into an elaborate demonstration of the beautiful way in which the Mantuan does follow nature. In short, though now and then to “save his face” an illustration is drawn honoris causa from Homer, this Second Book on the ordonnance of the poem is, till it ceases with a panegyric of Leo X., little more than a descant On the Imitation of Virgil.

It cannot be said that the Third Book offers much difference in this respect—though the idolatry of Virgil is in parts a little more disguised. It is, again more majorum, devoted to Diction, and, the Muses having been invited to cross the stage once more, our Mentor first reprobates Obscurity. But though you must not be obscure, you may and should be Figurative, and not a few of the best known of our ancient acquaintances the Figures—Metaphor, Hyperbole, Apostrophe, and so forth—are introduced and commended, or sometimes discommended. It is extremely noteworthy that the warnings-off include one far from ugly conceit—

“Aut crines Magnæ Genetricis gramina dicat.”

33This, of course, is quite in accordance with the horror of a daring metaphor—of one which runs the risk of seeming “frigid”—which we find prevailing from Aristotle to Longinus, and even in both these great men. To us, most assuredly, the likening of the grass to the tresses of Mother Earth is not in the least absurd, but a very beautiful and poetical phrase, awaking, and adjusting itself aptly to, a train of equally poetical suggestion. But before very long the advice as to the choice of language takes the plain and simple form, “Strip the Ancients!” The poet is bidden to fit

“exuvias veterumque insignia”

to himself; he is to gird himself up to the “theft,” and drive the spoil on every occasion. He who trusts to his own wit and invention is unhesitatingly condemned and pitied. If you want to live, to have your works escape decay, you must “steal.” Vida repeats the very word over and over again, and without the slightest bashfulness or compunction. He is, however, good enough to admit that, if a new word is absolutely wanted to express something not in the ancients, it may be invented or borrowed—say from Greek—as the older Latins had themselves done. When one word is difficult to find or awkward if found, you must employ Periphrasis. Compounds are permitted to a certain extent (the weakness of Latin and its brood in this respect is well known), but never to a greater than that of two words. Perterricrepas is stigmatised by innuendo, though the word itself is Lucretian, and though there is absolutely no principle in the restriction. You are to tone down ill-sounding proper names, as Sicharbas into Sichæus. But in all cases your words are to be entirely subservient to the sense, though they may and should be suited to it—a doctrine which lends itself of course to extensive Virgilian illustration. And so the poem concludes with a peroration of some length, drawing ever and ever closer to, and at last ending in, the laudation of the unrivalled Maro.

Had it not been for the astonishing accuracy with which, as has been said, Vida actually anticipated the dominant critical taste of something like three hundred years, and the creative 34taste of about half that period, not many more lines than we Essential poverty of its theory. have given pages might have been devoted to him. That the poem as a composition is a sufficiently elegant piece of patchwork may of course be freely granted; and it deserves perhaps less grudging praise for the extreme fidelity and ingenuity with which it illustrates its own doctrines. But those doctrines themselves are, whether we look at them in gross or in detail, some of the poorest and most beggarly things to be found in the whole range of criticism. That the prescriptions are practically limited to those necessary for turning out the epic or “heroic” poem does not so much matter—though it is not entirely without significance. Vida’s idea of poetry is simply and literally shoddy.[40] That fabric—the fact is perhaps not invariably known to those who use the word—differs from others, not as pinchbeck differs from gold, or cotton from silk, but in being exclusively composed of already manufactured and worn textures which are torn up and passed afresh through mill and loom. And this is the process—and practically the sole process—which Vida enjoins on the poet, going so far as to pronounce anathema on any one who dares to pursue any other.

When it is examined in detail the proceeding may excite even more astonishment, which will be wisely directed not more to Historical and symptomatic significance. the original conception of it than to the extent to which, from what followed, it seems to have hit certain peculiarities in the æsthetic sense of mankind as regards poetry. We may easily go wrong by devoting too much attention to the fact of Vida’s individual selection of the poet to whom all other poets are bound jurare in verba. It is certain that, from his own day to this, Virgil has appealed to many tastes—and to some of the greatest—secure of his result of being pronounced altissimo poeta. Those who like him least cannot but admit that Dante and Tennyson among poets, that Quintilian and Scaliger—nay, that even Boileau—among critics, are not precisely negligible quantities. But the real subject—not merely of astonishment but of reasonable 35and deliberate determination to adopt a position of “No Surrender” in the denial of Vida’s position—is this selection of any poet, no matter who it may be, as not only a positive pattern of all poetic excellence, but a negative index expurgatorius of all poetic delinquency. Not Homer, not Dante, not Shakespeare himself, can be allowed the first position; and the main principle and axiom of all sound Criticism is, that not merely no actual poet, but no possible one, can be allowed the second. This kind of poetical predestination—this fixing of a hard-and-fast type, within which lies all salvation and without which lies none—is utter blasphemy against the poetical spirit. Not only will simple imitation of the means whereby one poet has achieved poetry not suffice to enable another to achieve it, but this suggestion is by far the least dangerous part of the doctrine. It will probably lead to the composition of much bad poetry, but it will not necessarily cause the abortion, or the mistaking when born, of any that is good. The damnatory clauses of the creed must have, and did have, this fatal effect.

Vida and those who followed him excused themselves, were accepted by their disciples, and have recently been eulogised by our newest Neo-Classics, as following Nature and Reason. The alleged appeal to Reason and Nature. That they said—perhaps that they thought—they followed both is unquestionable.[41] But as a matter of fact their Law of Nature—like the Articles of War in Marryat’s novel—was a dead letter, owing to the proviso, from the first more or less clearly hinted at and latterly avowed, that all of Nature that was worth imitating had already been imitated by the ancients. As for the appeal to Reason, it is a mere juggle with words; and it is astonishing that at this time of day any one should be deluded by it. What Reason prescribes Invocations to the Muses? What Reason insists upon beginning at the middle instead of at the beginning? What Reason is there in the preference of the pale académie of Drances to the Rembrandt sketch of the demagogue whom Ulysses cudgelled? of the shield of Æneas to the car of Achilles? of Sichæus to Sicharbas? What has Reason to say (more than she has to say against poetic transports altogether) against the exquisite and 36endlessly suggestive metaphor of “the tresses of the Mighty Mother” for the grass, with its wave, and its light, and its shadow, and the outline of the everlasting hills and vales as of the sleeping body beneath it? In all these cases, and in a hundred others, we may boldly answer “None and Nothing!” The true Reason—the Mind of the World—has not a word to say against any of these forbidden things, or in favour of any of those preferred ones.

But there is, let it be freely enough granted, a false Reason which has, no doubt, very much to say against the one and in favour of the other. The warped and stunted common-sense, the pedestrian and prosaic matter-of-factness, which is no doubt natural enough in a certain way to mankind, had made little appearance during the Middle Ages. These Ages may be called, if any one chooses, childish, they may be still more justly called fantastic; but they were never prosaic. It might be said of their Time-Spirit as of the albatross, that

“Ses ailes de géant l’empêchent de marcher.”

But there was no doubt about the wings. With the Renaissance, prose, in the good sense no doubt as well as in the bad, returned; and as if to revenge itself for the universal employment of poetry during the Middle Ages themselves, it proceeded to lay hands even upon the poet. He might “transport”; with Longinus before them (if Vida had him not, his followers had), they could not very well deny this. But his methods of transporting must be previously submitted to a kind of inspectorship; and anything dangerous or unusual was strictly forbidden. His bolt was not to be “shot too soon nor beyond the moon”: he was most particularly not to be “of imagination all compact.” On the contrary, his imagination was to be alloyed with doses of the commonest common-sense. He might not even imp his wings save with registered feathers, and these feathers were to be neither too long nor too gay.

Such are the principles that we find in Vida, and such their inevitable result. Only let us once more repeat, not merely that he may well, in the admirable words of Lord Foppington, “be proud to belong to so prevailing a party” as the Neo-Classics of 37the following three centuries, but that he actually led and almost made that party himself.

A considerable time—more than a quarter of a century—had elapsed between Politian and Vida; but from the appearance of the latter’s book to the end of the century not more than three years on the average[42] passed without the appearance of a critical treatise of some importance. The main stream started. Every now and then a short lull would occur; but this was always made up by a greater crowd of writers after the interval. Such “rallies” of criticism (which occurred particularly during the fourth decade[43] of the century, about its very centre,[44] throughout the seventh,[45] eighth,[46] and ninth[47] decades, and just at the end[48]) were no doubt to some extent determined by the academic habits of the Italians, and the readiness with which members of the same academy, or different academies, took up the cudgels against each other. The individual exercises took various forms. A very large part of the work consists of commentaries on Aristotle’s Poetics; another, closely connected, of set “Arts Poetic,” more ostensibly original; some deal with vulgar and some with “regular” poetry, while the concrete and comparative method is by no means neglected, though the abstract and theoretic is on the whole preferred. To attempt classification by kind would be a sacrifice of real to apparent method; and to trace the development of the same ideas in different writers would lead to inextricable confusion and criss-cross reference. We shall probably find it best to follow the rule which has been observed with rare exceptions throughout this History—that of giving the gist 38of particular books and the opinions of particular authors together, and leaving bird’s-eye views to the Interchapters.

Only two years after the appearance of Vida’s poem appeared the next critical Italian book of importance, the first instalment of Trissino’s Poetica. Trissino. The first instalment—for a singular interval took place between the beginning and the completion of this work. The first four parts were, as has just been said, published in 1529, when the main stream of Italian criticism had hardly begun to flow; the two last not till 1563, two years after the publication of Scaliger’s great work, and after a full generation (in the ordinary count) of active discussion of the matters.[49] Such conditions cannot fail to affect the homogeneity of a book. But still Trissino put it forth as one book in different parts, not, as he might very well have done, and as others actually did, as two books; and we are therefore entitled, and indeed bound, with the caution just given, to treat it as a whole. The handsome quartos,[50] well printed and beautifully frontispieced and vignetted, of the standard edition of Trissino’s Opere, are perhaps, taking them together, rather an ornament to the shelf than a plentiful provision of furniture for the mind. The disadvantages of versi sciolti have not often been shown more conspicuously than in the Italia Liberata, and the Sofonisba has little but its earliness and regularity to plead as a set-off to the general shortcomings of the modern classical Drama. The better repute of Italian comedy would hardly have arisen from such pieces as I Simillimi; and the Rime are most ordinary things. In our own division he is of some historical account; for it is impossible not to be grateful to the first publisher of the De Vulgari Eloquio, and that praise of earliness, which he has earned in more than one respect, must be extended to the first four parts of the Poetica. He boasts justly enough that nobody, save Dante and Antonio da Tempo, was before him, and that both of these had written in Latin.

39Trissino does not, in his first instalment, busy himself with those abstract discussions which were soon to furnish the staple of Italian criticism. Division of his Poetic. He adopts Aristotle’s “Imitation” briefly without cavil or qualification; and then passes, in his First Part or “Division,” to the question of choosing your language, in which he generally follows Dante, but with an adaptation to the time. It is not with him a question of making an “Illustrious Vulgar Tongue,” an “Italian,” but of calling by that name one already adopted. In his further remarks on Diction he sometimes borrows, and often expands or supplements, the very words of Dante at first, and then passes to elaborate discussion, with examples, of the qualities of speech—Clearness, Grandeur, Beauty, Swiftness. Next he deals with what he calls the costume—character, ethos, suiting of style to person—with truth, artifice, and what he calls the “fashions”—that is to say, the alterations of quantity, &c., by dwelling, slurring, syncope, and the like. The arrangement of this First Division is not very logical; but, as we have seen, cross-division has been the curse of rhetorical-formal discussion of the kind from a very early period to the present day. The Second Division deals with pure prosody, the division of feet, shortening (rimozione), as in ciel for cielo, elision, cæsura, &c.; the Third with arrangement of verses and stanzas; the Fourth with the complete forms of Sonnet, Ballata, and Canzone, the sub-varieties of which were detailed with great care and plentiful examples.

Here what might more properly be called the First Part, consisting of these four divisions, ends; the long subsequent Second Part (made up of the Fifth and Sixth Divisions) has a separate Preface-dedication referring to the gap. These parts are not, like the others, divided into sections with headings; and, doubtless on the pattern if not of any one particular treatise, of the spirit of many which had gone between, they deal with general questions. The Imitation theory is handled at some length, and with citation of Plato as well as of Aristotle; the kinds of poetry are treated on a more general standard, and not with mere reference to the rules of constructing each. The larger part of the Fifth Division is given entirely to 40Tragedy: the Sixth begins with that Heroic Poem which was so much on the mind of the country and the century. But it ends chiefly on Figures—the formal heart of Trissino, long-travelled as it has been, fondly turning to its old loves at the last.

The contents of the treatise or treatises, especially if we take them with Trissino’s attempts to introduce the Greek Omega and the Greek Epsilon into Italian spelling, his grammatical “Doubts,” and his later “Introduction to Grammar,” his dialogue Il Castellano, and so forth,[51] will show his standpoint with sufficient clearness. His critical value. It is almost purely formal in the minor, not to say the minim, kinds of form. He is indeed credited by some with a position of importance, in the history of the Unities. He is, they say, the first to refer to the observance of the Unity of Time as a distinction from “ignorant poets,”[52] giving therewith a disparaging glance at mediæval drama.[53] But this overlooks the fact that he is simply repeating what Aristotle says, with an addition much more likely[54] to refer to non-Humanist contemporaries than to the almost forgotten “mystery.” His theory of the Heroic Poem, like his practice in the Italia Liberata, is slavishly Aristotelian. The chief evidence of real development that I can find is in his treatment of Comedy, where the extremely rapid and contemptuous dismissal of the Master called imperatively for some supplement, considering the popularity of the kind in the writer’s own time and country. Possibly reinforcing Aristotle here with Cicero, and certainly using the famous Suave mari magno of Lucretius, he succeeds in putting together a theory of the ludicrous to which, or to some subsequent developments of it in Italy, Hobbes’s “passion of sudden 41glory” has been[55] not unjustly traced. The “sudden” seems indeed to be directly due to Maggi, a critic who will be presently mentioned with other commentators on the Poetics. And Maggi had published long before Trissino’s later Divisions appeared, though, it may be, not before they were written.[56]

The growth during the interval had been of three kinds, sometimes blended, sometimes kept apart. Editors, &c., of the Poetics. The first kind consisted of translations, editions, and commentaries of and on the Poetics; the second, of abstract discussions of Poetry; the third, of more or less formal “Arts” not very different from Trissino’s own. The first class produced later, in the work of Castelvetro, a contribution of almost the first importance to the History and to the Art of Criticism; and it could not but exercise a powerful influence. It belongs, however, in all but its most prominent examples (such as that just referred to, which will be fully discussed in the next chapter), rather to monographers on Aristotle than to general historians of Criticism, inasmuch as it is mainly parasitic. Pazzi. Before any book of original critical importance later than Trissino’s had been issued, in 1536,[57] Alessandro de’ Pazzi published a Latin translation of the Poetics, which for some time held the position of standard, and a dozen years later came three important works on the book—Robortello’s edition of 1548, Segni’s Italian translation of 1549, and Maggi’s edition of 1550—all showing the attention and interest which the subject was exciting, while, still before the later “Divisions” of Trissino appeared, Vettori in 1560 added his edition, of greater importance than any earlier one. Long before this the book had become a regular subject of lectures. Of these writers Robortello, and still more Vettori (“Victorius”), were of the greatest service to the text; Maggi, who was assisted by Lombardi, to the discussion of the matter.[58]

42In the critical handling of these editors and commentators we find, as we should expect, much of the old rhetorical trifling. Robortello, Segni, Maggi, Vettori. For all their scorn, expressed or implied, of the Middle Ages, they repeat the distinctions of poetica, poesis, poeta, and poema[59] as docilely as Martianus, or a student of Martianus, could have done a thousand or five hundred years before, and they hand it on too as a sort of charmed catchword to Scaliger[60] and Jonson.[61] But brought face to face as they are with the always weighty, though by no means always transparently clear, doctrines of Aristotle, and self-charged with the duty of explaining and commenting them, they cannot, if they would, escape the necessity of grappling with the more abstract and less merely technological questions. Robortello,[62] like Maggi, though less elaborately, has a theory of the ludicrous. Both, and others, necessarily grapple with that crux of the katharsis which has not yet ceased to be crucial. Both, with Segni, discuss the Unity of Time and differ about it; though none of the three has yet discovered (as indeed it is not discoverable in Aristotle or Aristotle’s literary documents) the yet more malignant Unity of Place. Vettori would extend the cramp in time (not of course with the twenty-four hours’ limit) from tragedy to epic. Most of them have arrived at that besotment as to “verisimilitude” which is responsible for the worst parts of the Neo-Classic theory, and which, in the pleasant irony common to all entanglements with Duessas of the kind, makes the unfortunate lovers guilty of the wildest excesses of artificial improbability. And in all, whether they project their reflections on their text into more general forms or not, we can see the gradual crystallising of a theory of poetry, heroic, or dramatic, or general.

Nor was such theory left without direct and independent exposition during the period which we are considering. Theorists: Daniello. The first author of one is generally taken to be Daniello, whose Poetica appeared in 1536; and I have not discovered any earlier claimant. I do not quite understand 43how Mr Spingarn has arrived at the conclusion that “in Daniello’s theory of tragedy there is no single Aristotelian element,” especially as he himself elsewhere acknowledges the close—almost verbal—adherence of this early writer to the Stagirite. But it is probably true that Daniello was thinking more of the Platonic objections and of following out the Boccaccian defence, than of merely treading in the footprints of Aristotle. He is the first, since Boccaccio himself, to undertake that generous, if rather wide and vague as well as superfluous, “defence of poesy” which many Italians repeated after him, and which was repeated after them by our Elizabethans, notably by Sir Philip Sidney.

As his little book is somewhat rare, and as it has such good claims to be among the very earliest vernacular disputations of a general character on poetry in Italy, if not also in Europe, it may be well to give some account of it. My copy has no title-page, but dates itself by a colophon on the recto of the errata-leaf at the end, with a veto-privilege, by concession of the Pope, the seignory of Venice, and all the other princes and lords of Italy, advertised by Giovan Antonio di Nicolini da Sabio, Venice, 1536. It fills 136 small pages of italic type, and is in dialogue form, rather rhetorically but not inelegantly written, and dedicated by Bernardo Daniello of Lucca to Andrea Cornelio, Bishop-Elect of Brescia. Daniello does refer to Aristotle, and borrows (not perhaps quite intelligently) from him; but his chief sources are the Latins, and he sets or resets, with no small interest for us, that note of apology for the Poets against Plato which was to dominate Italian criticism, and after exercising some, but less, effect on French, to be strenuously echoed in England. There are some rather striking things in Daniello. He is sound enough on the mission of the poet as being to delight (though he is to teach too) and also to persuade—the ancient union of Poetics and limited Rhetoric evidently working in him. On the relations of poetry and philosophy he might be echoing Maximus Tyrius and Boccaccio, and very likely is thinking of the latter. But he strikes a certain cold into us by remarking that Dante (whom he nevertheless admires very much) was perhaps greater and more perfect as a philosopher than as a poet; and it does not seem likely that he 44was aware of the far-reaching import of his own words when he lays it down (p. 26) that Invention, Disposition, and Elocution being the three important things, the poet is not, as some think, limited to any special matter. If he had meant this, of course he would have come to one of those arcana of criticism which are even yet revealed, as matter of serene conviction, to very few critics. But he pretty certainly did not fully understand his own assertion; and indeed slurs it off immediately afterwards. After taking some examples from Dante and more from Petrarch, Daniello adopts (again prophetically) the doctrine that the Poet must practically know all arts and sciences, in order that he may properly deal with his universal subject. He is specially to study what is called in Latin Decorum and in Italian Convenevolezza. Tragedy and Comedy are to be rigidly distinguished. And so this curious First Blast of the Trumpet of sixteenth-century vernacular criticism is emphatic against the confusion which was to bring about the mightiest glories of sixteenth-century literature. A large part of the small treatise is taken up with examples, in the old rhetorical manner of qualities, “colours,” figures, &c. The whole of the latter part of the First Book consists of these, as does almost the whole of the Second, with an extension into verbal criticism of the passages cited as illustrating kinds, technical terms, and the like. Indeed the general considerations are chiefly to be found in the first forty or fifty pages; and it is really remarkable how much there is in this short space which practically anticipates in summary the ideas of most of the much more voluminous writers who follow.[63]

Fracastoro, physician, logician, and not ungraceful poet of the graceless subject of Syphilis, deals with both Plato and Aristotle in his dialogue Naugerius, and discourses deeply on the doctrine of Imitation, the Theory of Beauty, the 45Aristotelian conception of the poet as more universal and philosophical than the historian, and the Platonic objection to the intervals between poetry and truth. Fracastoro. This dialogue,[64] however (the full title is Naugerius sive de Poetica, its chief interlocutor being Andrea Navagero, the best follower of Catullus in Renaissance Latin[65]), tells a certain tale by its coupling with another, Turrius sive de Intellectione. It is wholly philosophical in intent and drift: it is perhaps the very “farthest”—comparatively early (1555) as is its date—of those Italian excursions, in the direction of making Criticism an almost wholly abstract and a priori subject, which balance the unblushing “Convey—do nothing but convey,” of Vida and his followers. One of its very earliest axioms (p. 324 ed. cit. infra) is that “qui recte dicere de hac re velit, prius sciat necesse est, quænam poetæ natura est, quidque ipsa poetica, tum et quis philosophi genius,” &c. It must be admitted that Fracastoro is among the very ablest and most thoroughgoing explorers of these altitudes. No one has more clearly grasped, or put more forcibly, than he has that compromise between Plato and Aristotle which has been and will be mentioned so often as characteristic of the Italian thinkers in this kind. Indeed, the fifty pages of his Dialogue are almost a locus classicus for the first drawing up of the creed which converted Sidney, and to which Milton, indocile to creeds as he was, gave scarcely grudging allegiance. It is full, too, of interest in deliverances on minor points—the difference between the orator and the rhetor (p. 343), the shaping of a particular kind of “orator” into a poet, his universality and his usefulness, the limits of his permitted fiction and the character of his charm. But Fracastoro is wholly in these generals: it is much if he permits himself a rare illustration from an actual poet.

And always in these writers we find the old deviations, the old red herrings drawn across the scent. Fracastoro himself, reasonable as he is in many ways, falls into the foolish old fallacy that a good poet must be a good man, and the less obviously 46ridiculous but still mischievous demand from him of the all-accomplished acquirements once asked of the rhetorician.

Putting aside, for the moment, such rather later and much more important works as the Discorsi of Giraldi Cinthio, the De Poetis Nostrorum Temporum of his half-namesake Lilius Giraldus, and the two capital treatises of Minturno, one of which appeared after Trissino’s book, we may give a few words to two Italian tractates, the Versi e Regole della Nuova Poesia Toscanaof Claudio Tolomei (1539) and Muzio’s or Mutio’s Italian verse Arte Poetica, which was published with some other work in 1551.[66] Formalists: Mutio. Tolomei and classical metres. The last is noteworthy as an early example of the vernacular critical poem—a kind suggested by Horace, and illustrated later by Boileau and Pope, but certainly more honoured by its practitioners than in itself. Yet it would not be just to deny Mutio a high if rather vague conception of poetry, and, in particular, a most salutary conviction that the poet must disrealise his subjects. Tolomei’s book, on the other hand, challenges attention as probably the beginning of that pestilent heresy of “classical metres” which, arising in Italy, and tainting France but slightly (as was natural considering the almost unquantified character of the modern French language), fastened with virulence upon England, affected some of our best wits, and was within measurable distance of doing serious harm. The plague was so much at its worst with us that the chapter on Elizabethan Criticism will be the proper place for its discussion. But though Ascham himself thought it no plague at all, it was certainly one of the very worst of these “Italianations” to which he objected so violently; and Tolomei was its first prophet in the country of its origin.

Not a few names, some famous in European literature for other performances of their bearers, some almost unknown 47except to the student of this subject, fall into one or other of these classes, or, as very commonly happens, qualify in a undecided manner for two, or for all. Others: Tomitano, Lionardi, B. Tasso, Capriano. As early as 1545 Tomitano[67] had dwelt on the above-mentioned fallacy of the necessary learning of poets: Lionardi,[68] nine years later, in a pair of Dialogues expressly devoted to Poetic Invention, extended this in the widest and wildest manner, so that the poet becomes a perfect good-man-of-the-Stoics—an all-round and impeccable Grandison-Aristotle. The same idea and others were emitted by Bernardo Tasso, good father of a great son, who not only practised poetry to the vast extent of the Amadigi, but discussed it in a formal Ragionamento of the subject.[69] Later, Capriano[70] gave the more elaborate exaltation of poetry as a sort of Art of Arts, combining and subduing to its own purpose all forms of Imitation, and following up Vida’s superfine objections to Homer as trivial and undignified, and his rapturous exaltation of the “decency” of Virgil. This book, very short, is also rather important—more so than might be judged from some accounts of it. It is neither paged, nor numbered in folio, but does not extend beyond signature F ii. of a small quarto, with a brief appendix of Italian verse. There are eight chapters—the first 48discussing what things are imitable and what imitation is; the second vindicating for poetry the portion of supreme imitative art; the third dividing it into “natural” and “moral”; the fourth arguing that Epic or Heroic (not, as Aristotle thinks, drama) is the highest kind of “moral” poetry; the fifth containing, among other things, an interesting revolt against Greek; the sixth discoursing on number and sound; the seventh exalting the good poem above everything; and the eighth rapidly discussing the origin, rank, necessity, parts, force, end, &c., of Poetry. Capriano does not give himself much room, and fails, like most of these critics, in the all-important connection of his theories with actual work; but he must have been a man of no common independence and force of thought.[71]

More important than these to us, though less technically critical, and therefore in some cases commending themselves less to students of the subject from some points of view, are some poets and men of letters of the earlier and middle parts of the century who have touched critical subjects. Il Lasca. I should myself regard the Prologues[72] of Grazzini (“Il Lasca”)—in which he repeatedly and unweariedly protests against the practice of moulding Italian comedy upon Plautus and Terence, regardless of the utter change in manners, and so forth—as worth shelves full of “in-the-air” treatises. For this application of the speculum vitæ[73] notion, the idea of The Muses’ Looking-glass, which was obtained from Cicero through Donatus, was the salvation of the time, keeping Comedy at least free from the fossilising influences of the false Imitation. Although the unwary might reasonably take the author of the famous caution not to read St Paul for fear of spoiling style (there are at least half-a-dozen of the greatest pieces of style in the world to be found in the two Epistles to the Corinthians alone) as 49either a silly practitioner of undergraduate paradox or a serious dolt, yet the Della Volgar Lingua of Bembo[74] is by no possibility to be neglected in taking account of the critical attitude of Italy at the time. Bembo. It is of course too purist and “precious”; it “sticks in the letter” to a perilous extent; but there is real appreciation in it of what the writer can appreciate, and among the things that he can appreciate are good and great things. Caro. Annibale Caro has (and deserves) a bad name, not merely for the unfair manner in which he carried on his controversy with Castelvetro (see next chapter), but for the tedious logomachy of the controversy itself, which on his side, besides filling a regular Apologia and other pieces, overflows constantly into his letters.[75] Varchi. But this very controversy testifies to the zest and the undoubted sincerity with which literary matters were dealt with by the Italians, and it served further as a starting-point for the elaborate Ercolano[76] of Varchi, who in divers lectures, &c., also dealt with the more abstract questions of the nature of poetry, the status of the poet, and the like. In short, the documents on the subject have already reached the condition referred to by the warning given in the introductory chapter to the first volume of this book, that while in that volume we had to search for and discuss every scrap bearing on the subject, here large classes of document would have to be treated by summary and representation only.

Moreover, great as are the volume and the intensity of Italian attention to criticism in the years between 1535 and 1560, the Devil’s Advocate may, without mere cavilling, cast disparagement upon most of its expressions. The dealings of the scholars with the subject are no doubt to a certain extent accidental or obligatory; they might have bestowed, and in fact actually did bestow,[77] at least equal pains on texts not directly, or not 50at all, concerning criticism. The work of Tolomei is merely an example of those Puckish tricks which something sometimes plays on the human intellect; that of Muzio a dilettante exercise mainly. The treatises of the others from Daniello to Varchi hover between abstract discussion, which sometimes approaches twaddle, dilettante trifling which makes the same approach on another side, and an estimable, but for literature at large comparatively unimportant, guerilla about the virtues and qualities, the vices and defects, of the Italian language—a language which had already seen its very best days, and was settling down to days very far from its best. The three authors to whom we shall now come, and who will occupy us to the end of this chapter, escape, in one way or another, the brunt of all these grudgements. Minturno supplies us with the most wide-ranging and systematic handlings of poetry in its general, and of “regular” and “vulgar” poetry in their particular, aspects that had yet been produced, Giraldi Cinthio with some of the most original critical essays, Lilius Giraldus with a survey of the poetical, and to some extent the literary, state of Europe in his 51time, for the like of which we may look in vain before and not too successfully since.

Antonio Sebastiano, called Minturno (which is stated—I know not with what correctness—in a MS. note in my copy of the Arte Poetica to be merely an “academic” surname), is a good example of that combination of scholastic thoroughness and diligence with wider range of study which honourably distinguishes the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, but which, save in rare instances, went out in the later years of the last-named age, and has too seldom been recovered since. Minturno. In 1559 he produced a De Poeta and in 1563 an Arte Poetica, one of which, as the respective titles imply, is written in Latin and the other in Italian, but which are by no means replicas of each other with the language changed. Both were printed at Venice; and though they came from different presses, they range very well together, both being in a smallish quarto, but with very close type, so that the 560 odd pages of the De Poeta and the 450 odd of the Arte contain between them a vast amount of matter. The plans of the two treatises—which are allotted naturally according to their language, the Latin to poetry in general and to classical verse, the Italian to its own kind—are not strikingly but slightly different. The De Poeta, which is addressed to Ettore Pignatelli, Duke of Bivona, takes the time-honoured form of a symposium or dialogue, the persons being the poet Sannazar (who is always introduced by his Latin names of Actius Syncerus) and his friends, and the scene the famous Villa Mergellina. Indeed, Minturno seems to have written the book at Naples, whence he dates it a year before that of its appearance. In the later work he himself is the principal speaker, his antagonists or interlocutors being Vespasiano Gonzaga in the First book, Angelo Costanzo in the Second, Bernardino Rota in the Third, and Ferrante Carafa in the Fourth. The dialogue-form, it may also be mentioned, is less, and that of the formal treatise more, prominent in the Arte.

Both volumes have the invaluable accompaniment of side-notes—an accompaniment which not only makes the writer’s point more easily intelligible to the reader, but prevents the 52writer himself from straying. The De Poeta. But the De Poeta is not furnished with either Contents or Index, while the Arte is liberally provided with both. This, in the first case, is to be regretted, not merely because the book is much the longer of the two, but because the indulgences of the dialogic form are more fully taken in it. After a suitable beginning (with a fons and a platanus and other properties), the subject is opened with a panegyric of poetry. The origins of literature were in verse; all nations practised it. A more sensible line is taken (it will be understood that the interlocutors of course take different views, and one judges by the general drift) on the subject of the all-accomplishment of the poets, than is the case with some of the writers above mentioned; but Minturno points out (which is no doubt true enough) that poetry in a manner “holds all the Arts in fee,” can draw upon and dignify all. On the connection of verse with poetry he holds a middle position, close to that of Aristotle himself, and not very different from that long after taken up by Coleridge in the Biographia Literaria. He will not pronounce verse essential to poetry, but evidently thinks that poetry would be extremely foolish to dispense with its practically inseparable companion. The consecrated procession of poets from Amphion and Orpheus to Homer and even Virgil is set a-going as usual. Then the discussion, after a little skirmishing, settles down at p. 22 to the question of Imitation; and, amid much scholastic subdivision of its kinds and manners, the delight produced by this is very strongly insisted on. Next, the Platonic onslaught is discussed, and urged or repelled by turns; the defence being clearly the author’s side, and maintained with considerable vigour, and with plentiful examples from Homer and Virgil both. The line taken, however, leads Minturno to lay stress on the instructive power of poetry. The poet’s purpose will, he holds, govern his imitation, and direct it so as to excite admiration in the reader or hearer. This is possibly the source of the next-century endeavour to elevate Admiration to the level of Pity and Terror themselves.[78] Hence Minturno is constrained to share the idea 53of the necessarily virtuous character of the poet: and, except that he never separates the delectare from the prodesse altogether, he hugs the dangerous shore of the hérésie de l’enseignement too closely in his endeavour to escape the Platonic privateers. By degrees the discussion glides into the comparison of Epic and Tragedy, and the question whether Poetry is a matter of Art or of Inspiration—and decides that it is both. And the First Book ends with the pronouncement that a good poet must be a good man, but that he may sometimes deal with not-good things.

The Second begins with one of the demonstrations (which to us seem otiose, but which were very important, not merely to the ideas of the age, but as bulwarks against the Puritan and Utilitarian objections of all times) that the poets, especially Homer and Virgil, are masters, whether necessarily or not, of all the liberal arts and of philosophy as well. When we remember the Philistine anti-poetics of Locke much more than a century after Minturno’s time—nay, the still existing, if lurking, idea that “great poet” must be (as somebody asserts that it is or was in Irish slang) synonym for “utter fool”[79]—we shall not bear too hardly on our author. But this discussion, in its turn, is bid to “come up higher.” What is to be the Institutio Poetæ? What is he to do and learn that he may in turn (p. 102) “delight, teach, transport.”[80]

In all cases the admiration of the reader or hearer (p. 104) must follow. But it will be obtained not quite in the same way as by the orator, and with a difference in the different kinds of poetry. The parts of a poem, too, are dealt with in a more or less Aristotelian manner, but with large additions and substitutions, in view of the greater range of literature that Minturno has before him, and of the desire specially to bring in Virgil, of whom our critic, though not quite such a fanatical partisan as Vida and Scaliger, is a hearty admirer (see for instance p. 135). All the “parts” have more or less attention in this book, both with reference to the different “kinds,” 54especially epic and “heroic,” and also with regard to those general principles of poetry which Minturno never forgets. The Third Book of nearly 100 pages is directly devoted to tragedy; and Minturno pursues in reference to this the same plan of following, but with a certain independence and a great deal of expatiation, in Aristotelian footsteps. He still lays great stress on Admiration; and it is really curious that in thus forestalling, no doubt, Corneille’s teaching, he has by anticipation hit at Racine and the doucereux in a phrase[81] which has been fairly guessed to have supplied Milton with a famous one[82] of his own. He does not pay so much attention to the crux of the katharsis (on which most of these critics necessarily dwell more or less) in this treatise as in the Arte (v. infra).

The Fourth Book, even longer than the Third, is, like it, entirely devoted to one subject; and the change of modern as compared with ancient view is shown strongly by the fact that this subject is Comedy. The admirers of Plautus and Terence, the countrymen of Ariosto and Machiavelli, could not, indeed, be expected to turn from Comedy with the disdainful shoulder of Aristotle; but such elaborate treatment as this shows the hold which the subject had obtained. Yet it is ominous that Minturno devotes especial attention to the subject of types; though, in accordance with his usual practice, he gives much space to a general treatment of the Ludicrous and its sources. There is also a good deal of curious detail in this Book as to costume and theatrical arrangements generally. The Fifth turns to Lyric, and sets forth its different kinds, including Satire among them. And the Sixth deals with Diction and Prosody, the section allotted to the latter being comparatively short and interspersed between two on Style, proceeding of course a good deal by Figures, though not in the most cut-and-dried manner, and illustrated (as indeed are all the later Books) by abundant and unceasing quotation. It may 55be observed that, as perhaps might be expected, the dialogue-character disappears in them more and more, and the book takes the form of a simple exposition by one or other of the personages. This change prepares us for the arrangement of the Arte.

This book, as dates given and to be given show, was published subsequently to the appearance of Scaliger’s Poetic, and may have been to some extent influenced by it; but I do not think that Minturno, who mentions Trissino and Bembo and Tolomei, ever refers to it, and he does not give one the idea of a man who would conceal debts. The Arte Poetica. In fact, his work upon the same subject had been completed earlier. In this he has necessarily to go over some of the same ground; but, as noted above, he repeats very little. He starts with a general definition of poetry as an imitation of various manners and persons in various modes, either with words or with harmonies or with “times” separately, or with all these things together, or with part of them. Other ternaries follow, as matter, instrument, and mode; manners, affections, and deeds; suprahuman, human, and infrahuman; personages; words, music, and “times”; epic, scenic, and melic; prose, verse, and mixed narrative. These distinctions are put forth in an orderly manner, but succinctly and without the discussion which is a feature of the general parts of the De Poeta, Minturno evidently thinking that he has sufficiently cleared the ground in that work. After some further exposition of forms, &c., the handling is more specially directed to Epic (i.e., narrative generally), and its parts and conditions are expounded, still with a certain swiftness, but at greater length than before. And once more the treatment concentrates itself—this time upon Romance. The origin of the name and thing is lightly touched, and then the great question is broached,[83] “Is Romance poetry?” Minturno will not refuse it the name; but he cannot admit that it is the same kind of poetry as that of which Aristotle and Horace have spoken. The contrarieties of 56Romance and Heroic poetry are then carefully examined; and while much praise is given to Ariosto, some fault is found with him, and the mantle of the Odyssey is especially refused him. In fact, Minturno holds generally that the Romance is a defective form of poetry, ennobled by the excellence of some of its writers—a sort of middle position which is very noteworthy. But he hardens his heart against the irresistible historical and inductive argument which the defenders of the Romance had already discovered, and will have it that the laws of poetry are antecedent to poetic production (p. 32). And for his main style of narrative poetry he returns to Epic or “Heroic” proper, and discusses it on the old lines of Plot, Character, Manners, Passions or Affections, &c., always with modern examples from the great Italian poets. He also makes the very important, but very disastrous, suggestion that the Christian religion provides all the necessary “machinery” of Heroic,—a suggestion which was elaborately followed out by Tasso and by Milton and by many a lesser man, and which Dryden had thought of following, though he luckily did not.[84]

The Second Book takes up Drama in the same manner, but—as was always made legitimate by the parasitic character of at least Italian Tragedy—with much more reference to ancient and less to modern writers. The Third Book deals with Lyric, the same inclusion of Satire which we have noticed in the De Poeta being made; and the Fourth with Poetic Diction, Prosody, &c., still on the lines of the earlier treatise, but with entire adaptation to the Italian subject. The latter books, as is natural, are much more meticulous in their arrangement, descending, with complete propriety, to the minutest details of rhyme and metre, as well as, where necessary, of grammar. But Minturno never loses an opportunity of ascending to the higher and more general considerations—the nature of harmony, the origin and quality of rhyme, &c., the characters of kinds, and even, to some extent, of authors. It is characteristic of him to give an elaborate discussion of the Italian alphabet letter by letter from the poetical point of view, and to strike off from this to a consideration of the relations of 57Italian, Latin, and foreign modern languages, the general methods of elevating style, and the question whether there ought to be completely separate diction for poetry and prose.

It is the presence of this contrast, or combination, in him which, as much as anything else, has determined more attention in this place to Minturno than to some other authors before noticed. Their value. In combination of thoroughness and range he seems to me to hold a position both high and rather solitary. He has not quite the elaborate system of Scaliger, but then he is much less one-eyed; he is less original—has less diable au corps—than Castelvetro, but he is far less eccentric and incalculable. His unfeigned belief in the noble and general theories of poetry and the poet is set off by his sedulous attention to particulars, as his attention to particulars is by his escapes of relief into the region of generalisation, and by his all-important addition of “transport” to “teach” and “delight.” He has not reached—he has in fact declined—the historical antinomianism of Patrizzi (v. next chap.); but that was inevitable, since this view was in part a reaction from the movement which he represented, in part a development of theories contemporary with himself. And his attitude in regard to the Romanzi is a significant sign of the turn of the tide. Earlier, and in the neo-classics quand même later, the fact that a thing differs in kind from the accepted forms of poetry is proof that it is not poetry at all. Minturno cannot go this length. It is poetry inferior in kind, he still insists; but the excellence of those who have adopted it saves it, no matter to what extent. The concession is fatal. If Balbus builds a wall contrary to the laws of nature and architecture, it will not be an inferior wall; it will tumble down, and not be a wall at all. If he works a sum on the principle that two and two make five, his answer will be hopelessly wrong. But if the wall stands, if the sum comes right, the laws, the principles, cannot be wrong, though they may be different from others. The infallible and exclusive Kind-rules of the ancients are doomed to be swept away through the little gap in the dam that Minturno has opened.

58The Discorsi[85] of Giraldi Cinthio—famous author of Novelle, and now much less famous, but perhaps not much less remarkable, producer of the chief Italian horror-tragedy, the Orbecche—supply a very interesting supplement-contrast to Minturno, whose earlier work they preceded by but a few years, and whom they provided with a theory of Romance to protest against. Giraldi Cinthio’s Discorsi. The exact date of the most interesting of them, and the question of property or plagiarism in their contents, have been the subject of one of those tedious “quarrels of authors” which are thickening upon us, but which we shall avoid as far as possible. On Romance. Cinthio and a certain pupil of his, Giovanbattista Pigna, published in the same year (1554) books on the “Romances”—i.e., poems like Ariosto’s. Authorities decide in favour of the novelist, who asserts that his book was written in 1549, while each asserted that he had furnished the other with ideas; but it really does not matter. The point is, that on one of the two, and very probably on both, there had dawned the critical truth, which nobody had seen earlier, and on which Minturno himself would have pulled down “the blanket of the dark” once more if he could. Cinthio, it seems, first struck out the true line, and Pigna later developed it in still greater detail. Aristotle did not know Romance, and therefore his rules do not and cannot apply to it; while Italian literature generally is so different in circumstances from Greek that it must follow its own laws. Then Cinthio takes Ariosto and Boiardo, as Aristotle himself had taken the poets that were before him, and formulates laws from them. He does not ostracise the single-action and single-hero poem, the Aristotelian epic. But he adds the many-actioned and many-heroed poem like Ariosto’s, and the chronicle-poem of successive actions by one party, of which there are examples from Statius downward (and of which, we may add, the Odyssey itself is really an example). For these two latter, which he rightly regards as both Romantic, he and 59Pigna (who is more specially Ariostian) gave rules accordingly, and Cinthio even illustrated his by a poem on Hercules. Both, but especially Pigna, despite their revolutionary tendencies in certain ways, cling to the ethical point of view, and maintain, perhaps a little hardily, that the modern romantic writers actually surpass the ancients in this respect.

In their main contention Cinthio and Pigna were no doubt right, and much in advance of their time. On Drama. The reply of Minturno that Poetry may adapt itself to the times, but cannot depart from its own fundamental laws, is clearly a petitio principii. In his less important Discorso on the Drama Cinthio is hardly at all rebel to Aristotle—indeed it is very important to observe that even in the Romance Essay he has none of the partisan and somewhat illiberal anti-Peripateticism which we find later in Bruno and others. There he goes on the solid ground that Aristotle did not know the Kind for which he does not account—that he was no more blamable than, as we may say, supposing that he had given a definition of mammalia which excluded the kangaroo. In the Drama Cinthio had not been brought face to face with any similarly new facts. Italian tragedy, his own included, was scrupulously Senecan, if not quite scrupulously Aristotelian, in general lines. Italian comedy followed Plautus and Terence only too closely; and though Cinthio’s lines of criticism (strengthened by the Ciceronian-Donatist theory of the speculum vitæ) led him, like Il Lasca and others, to insist on the different circumstances of Italian literature here also, they necessitated no new lawmaking as in the case of the Romanzi.

Both Discorsi are full of ingenious aperçus, sometimes followed out—sometimes not. Some points in both. For instance, when Cinthio (i. 24) cites his three examples of writers who have treated their heroes from childhood upwards contrary to the Aristotelian principles, he instances Xenophon in the Cyropædia as well as Statius and Silius Italicus. The instance does not in his expressed remarks, but it might very well in his own or others’ thoughts, lead to the consideration that whether verse is or is not essential to poetry, it is certainly not essential to Romance—with all the momentous and far-reaching 60consequences of that discovery. Again he seems (i. 82) to have appreciated, with a taste and sense rare in his age, the impropriety of mixing up Christian and Pagan mythology. And the same taste and sense appear, as a rule, in the minuter remarks (p. 100 sq.) on verse and phrase, and even on those minutest points not merely of verbal but of literal criticism which the Italians, more sensible than some modern critics, never despised, though they may sometimes have gone to the other extreme. In fact, the last half, and rather more, of the Discorso is not so much concerned with the Romances as with poetic diction and arrangement in general, or even with these matters as concerns literature both in prose and in verse.

The dramatic Discorso, or rather Discorsi (for we may throw in a third piece on Satiric Composition), is much shorter than that on the Romances, being necessarily less controversial, and therefore, as has been said, less original. But Cinthio’s independence of mind does not desert him even here. He is said to have been the first Italian who dared, in the Orbecche before mentioned, to disregard the Senecan practice[86] (so tedious in all modern imitations of it, and so crushingly exhibited in our own earliest tragic attempts) of beginning with an entire scene, or even act, of monologue. But, as often happens, his licences in some directions invite condonation by a tighter drawing of the reins elsewhere. He is credited (or debited) with the first reference in modern literature to the Unity of Time: and though it is well always to accept these assertions of priority with a certain suspension of judgment, it may be so. It is at any rate certain that he does out-Aristotle Aristotle in regard to this Unity, upon which, as is well known, the Stagirite lays very little stress. But he makes some amends by relaxing the proscription of the happy ending, so long as the proper purging effects of pity and terror are achieved. He also to some extent relaxes the extremest stringency of the old rule about trucidations 61coram populo. There may be death on the stage: but generally the bienséances of domestic life should be preserved there. On one point, in which Cinthio has had assigned to him the position of anti-Aristotelian origin, I venture to differ as to the interpretation of the Poetics themselves, not merely from Mr Spingarn but from Professor Butcher.[87] The later Neo-Classics, and especially the French, may have made rank too absolute a qualification of the tragic Hero. But I must say that I think they had their justification from Aristotle himself, and that Cinthio is at worst but dotting the i's of the Stagirite as to σπουδαῖοι and χρηστοί. His extreme admiration of the choruses of Seneca (in justification whereof he cites Erasmus) is not wholly unwarranted. Few modern readers, unfortunately, know the stately beauty of these artful odes: though of course his preference (p. 81) of them to “all the Greeks” is wrong, and was probably occasioned by the very small attention which most Renaissance writers paid to Æschylus. The elaborate distinctions which he, like others, seeks to draw between Tragedy and Comedy from artificial points of view are to some extent justified by the very absence of such distinctions in Aristotle. They thought it their duty to supply what they did not find.

The Discourse, or rather Letter (for it bears both titles, and in scale and character rather deserves the latter name) on Satire is confessedly supplementary to the other Discorsi, and may be at least connected with the fact that the indefatigable author had himself attempted a satiric piece, Egle. On Satire. He lays stress on the special connection of the Satire with the cult of Bacchus, takes into consideration the poetical as well as the scenic form, mentions the mixed or Varronian variety, and even extends his view to the Bucolic or Pastoral proper. But there are only some five-and-twenty pages, and the thing seems to have been really composed at “request of friends.”

From a critic who did so much it would be somewhat unreasonable to demand more. In fact, though Cinthio did not go so far along the high historic path of truth as did Patrizzi thirty years later, he set on that path a firm foot. For the moment, and in Italy, the romanzi were the true battle-ground; 62just as in England, for instance, that battle-ground was to be found a little later in the drama. At a period so early as this, and so close to the actual revolution of the Renaissance, it could hardly be expected that any one should reach the vantage-ground of a comprehensive survey of all literature, so as to deduce from it the positive and enfranchising, and not even from it the negative and disfranchising, laws of poetry. Not only had the vernaculars, with the exception of Italian itself, hardly furnished, at the time when Cinthio wrote, any modern literature fit to rank with the ancient—not only was it far too late, or far too early, to expect any one to give mediæval literature a fair chance with both—but men were still actually disputing whether the vernaculars had a right to exist. They were, like his namesake and clansman, to whom we come next, hinting surprise that any man of genius and culture should employ these vernaculars when he might write Latin, or, like one of his antagonists, Celio Calcagnini, aspiring to the disuse of vernacular for literary purposes altogether. In an atmosphere still so far from clear, with such heats and mists about, it is no small credit to Cinthio that, whether moved by mere parochial patriotism or by the secret feeling that sua res as a novelist was at question, or by anything else, he heard and caught at the dominant of the tune of criticism proper.

Pigna’s I Romanzi,[88] whatever we may think of the quarrel between him and Cinthio, is a book not to be mentioned without considerable respect, or dismissed with mention so merely incidental as that given to it above. Pigna. It is mainly, but not solely, a defence of Ariosto, and has not a few merits,—a just conception of the essentially Romantic nature of the Odyssey, a very careful and in the main sensible discussion of Prosody, and a widish comparison of instances. The main defect of it is the besetting sin of the whole three centuries with which this volume deals—the Obsession of the Kind. Instead of being satisfied with the demonstration (which he and Cinthio had reached) that Romance is not Epic, and is not bound by Epic laws, Pigna torments himself to show that Romance is Epic in this particular, not-Epic in that, and is 63alternately subject to and free from bondage: while some of his detailed investigations may raise smile, or sigh, or shrug, according to mood or temperament. Thus for instance he inquires (after a fashion which we shall find echoed in Ronsard) into the character of the objects—Lance, Horn, Ring—with which fatura (fairy agency) is usually associated, till we feel inclined to say, “O learned and excellent signor, the poet may put fatura in a warming-pan—if he pleases, and can do it poeticamente!” But the book is, on the whole, a good book: and Pigna deserves to rank with Cinthio and Patrizzi as one of the Three who, alone in this first modern stage, saw, if but afar-off and by glimpses, the Promised Land from which the ship of criticism was to be once more driven by adverse winds for centuries to come.

A document of exceptional importance for us is provided by the two curious dialogues De Poetis Nostrorum Temporum[89] of Lilius Gregorius Giraldus, written about 1548-50, and dedicated partly to Renée of Ferrara, the French Princess who for a time protected Marot and others, partly to Cardinal Rangoni. Lilius Giraldus: his De Poetis Nostrorum Temporum. Lilius, who was now in a good old age (he had been born in 1478), a Humanist of the better class, and a sincere Catholic possessed of sufficient independence of current ill-fashions to speak with severity of the verses of Beccadelli, would seem also to have been, at first- or second-hand, a man of very wide literary knowledge. His acquaintance with More[90] might be partly (as his very high estimate is certainly) conditioned by ecclesiastical partisanship; but he speaks of Wyatt long before Tottel’s Miscellany made that poet’s works publicly known, even in his own country, and, what is still more remarkable, of Chaucer.[91] Its width of range. Neither France nor Germany is excluded with the 64usual Italian uppishness,[92] though Giraldus cannot help slipping the word barbarus more than once off his tongue. And though Italy herself has, as we should expect, the lion’s share, yet the process of sharing is not pursued to that extreme of ridiculous arrogance which has been shown by the Greeks in their decadence, by the French in their Augustanism, and by the Italians themselves more than once.

But this real knowledge on Giraldus’ part, and the fairness of his spirit, only serve to accentuate the drift in the course and direction of this, the most important general summary of its kind that we meet between the Labyrinthus and the seventeenth century. But narrowness of view. Giraldus, though he does not absolutely exclude the vernaculars, is perfectly convinced that poetry, and indeed literature generally, means—first of all, and as far as its aristocracy goes exclusively—writing in Latin; nay, with him even translation from the classical languages is a more important thing than original composition in the vulgar tongue. Horror at preference of vernacular to Latin. His contempt of this latter is thinly though decently veiled in the passage on drama (ed. cit., p. 40), where, speaking of the writers of comedy, and rightly preferring Ariosto to Bibbiena, he says, “sed enim vernaculo sermone id plerique opus aggressi pauci mea sententia assecuti sunt;” speaks (with a sort of visible shake of the head, as over a good man lost) of Ariosto himself as one who “Latino carmine aliquando ludit, sed nunc totum se vernaculis tradidit, atque inter cetera furentem Orlandum dare curat in publicum;[93] patronisingly remarks of Trissino’s projected Sophonisba, that if the whole of it is as good as the acts that the author recites, “erit, licet vernacula ipsa, Latinorum tamen non indigna lectione,” wonders at this George who “est ipse et Græce et Latine bene doctus, at nunc fere in vernaculis conquiescit,” and ends with an impatient “Verum de vernaculis jam satis,” and a mutter about tonsores sellulariique. He speaks still less ambiguously later (ibid., p. 85), where cobblers and 65other dregs of the people are added to barbers and mechanics in general (as a tail to a list headed by Boiardo, Pulci, Politian, and Lorenzo de' Medici!), and at last liberates his real feeling in a sentence, which many very excellent men in all European countries would have indorsed till nearly the end of the eighteenth century, “Ex quo nescioqui viri alioqui docti in eam hæresim incidere ut non modo vernaculas velint Latinis litteris æquare verum etiam anteponere, quin et id etiam litteris prodidere.” “Whence some persons, in other respects learned, have fallen into such a heresy that they not only choose to make the vernaculars equal with Latin, but even to set them above it—nay, they have actually given literary expression to the doctrine.” A terrible thing to Humanists, and, alas! one to which they have since had to make up their minds! Unfortunately, the two great classical languages now pay, and for some time to come are likely to continue paying, the penalty of this idle miscalculation and outrecuidance on the part of their mistaken partisans; and it is the first duty of all lovers of letters now to fight for their maintenance in due place.

But still the almost invincible equity of the man displays itself even in his judgment of these unhappy schismatics; and he seems to make some difference between the vernacular dialects and the Sermo Etruscus. On Berni, Alamanni, the two “gentlewomen-poetesses,” as the Italians call them, Vittoria Colonna and Veronica Gambara, Speroni, La Casa, Aonio Paleario, Molza, he has things amiable and acute at once to say.

But his heart is not here, nor in the mention of the poor barbarous foreigners who may perhaps have some better excuse than “Latins” for not writing in the Latin tongue. Yet a real critic in both kinds. It is of those who do so write—Italians first of all but also others—that he really thinks as “the poets of his time.” He can find room for a mere grammarian (though a very excellent grammarian) like William Lilly: he speaks of him magnificentissime, and if this notice contrasts rather comically with the brief and cold reference to Erasmus, it is fair to remember not merely that Erasmus was by no means persona grata to the Roman orthodox, but that his 66poetical work is really nothing as compared with his exquisite prose.

He begins with the two Mirandolas, Pontanus, Marullus, and Sannazar, and is copious though not uncritical on them all: non numquam nimis lascivire et vagari videtur, he says of Pontanus. Short précis of the dialogues. Recalled by his interlocutor to still earlier writers, he has the judgment of “the Panormitan”[94] (Beccadelli), which has been noticed, and a by no means unremarkable one, dwelling ominously on the “facility” of Mapheus Vegius, the egregious person who took upon himself to write a thirteenth Æneid. Many forgotten worthies (among whom Filelfo and the better Aretines, Charles and Leonard, are the least forgotten) lead us (for Bembo and Sadolet have had their position earlier, and will have it again) to a famous pair, Mantuan and Politian. Giraldus is decisive and refreshing on Mantuan. This loudly over-praised poet is extemporalis magis quam poeta maturus, and as to his being alter Maro, why “Bone Deus! quam dispar ingenium!”[95] He is much more favourable to the author of the Nutricia and the Manto, but does not forget his swashing blow even here. Politian seems to him to have written calore potius quam arte, and to have used little diligence either in choosing his subjects or correcting his work. The Strozzi and Urceus Codrus follow, with many minor lights, from the notices of whom the judgment on Ludovicus Bigus Pictorius of Ferrara stands out as applicable, unfortunately, to some greater men and many as small or smaller. “Cum pius deflexit ad religionem, ut vita melior ita carmine deterior visus est.” Then one of the regulation pieces of flattery as to the Augustan character of the rule of Leo Maximus conducts us to notices of Naugerius and Vida, where the moderate and deserved praise of the first would contrast oddly (if we did not know how the pseudo-classical tradition for two hundred years and more said vehement “ditto” to Giraldus) with the extravagant eulogies on the polished emptiness of the latter. And then a great turba 67comes, among which the two Beroalds, Acciauoli and, among blind poets, Bello, the author of the Mambriano, chiefly take the eye.

We have noted the condescension to such poor vernacular creatures as Ariosto, Bibbiena, and (with a long interval certainly) Trissino and the author of the first Rosmunda. It is succeeded by another review of persons long relinquished to dusty shelves and memories, with a few better known names like Molza and Longolius. The praise of the great Fracastorius is much more moderate than we might have expected—probably Giraldus did not like his subject—and then there is a curious passage on “fancy” verses, leonine, serpentine, and others, leading to yet another, in which the worse side of the Renaissance—its contempt for the Middle Ages—is shown by a scornful reference to Architrenios et Anti-claudianos, which finishes the first dialogue. The second is of a wider cast, but needs less minute account here, though it is at least as well worth reading. It begins with the Greeks, who did so much for Italy, from Gemistus Pletho and Chrysoloras downwards, then takes the Spaniards and Portuguese, then our own countrymen, then the Germans and French. Here comes the description of Erasmus as inter Germanos Latinus inter Latinos aliquando Germanus; and here Giraldus frankly confesses that he is not going to say anything about persons like Œcolampadius, Bucer, Sturm, and Melanchthon, since they were not contented to confine themselves to good literature, and would know too much, and trouble Israel with Luther. But a good word is spared, justly, for the author of the Basia, with a reversion to still younger men, among whom Palingenius, Julius Cæsar Scaliger, and Castelvetro are the best known, and with the final fling at the vernaculars above given.

Such a book, with its wonderful width of range[96] and its 68sometimes equally wonderful contraction of view, is worth, to the historian of real criticism, a dozen long-winded tractates hunting the old red-herrings of critical theory. Their great historic value. The De Poetis Nostrorum Temporum gives us one of those veritable and inestimable rallying-points of which our History should be little more than a reasoned catalogue, connected by summary of less important phenomena. Referring duly to it, we find ourselves at the standpoint of a man who has really wide knowledge, and who, when his general assumptions do not interfere, has a real critical grasp. But the chief of these assumptions is not merely that the vernaculars have not attained equality with the classics—this, allowing for inevitable defects of perspective and other things, would not be fatal—but that they cannot attain such equality, much less any superiority. The point of view—to us plain common-sense—that if Sannazar and others wrote in Latin about Christian subjects, they should use Christian Latin, seems to Giraldus the point of view of a kind of maniac. Without the details and developments of Vida, he is apparently in exact accordance with that excellent Bishop. Cicero and Virgil, not to mention others, have achieved for literature a medium which cannot be improved upon, and all those who adopt any other are, if not exactly wicked, hopelessly deceived and deluded. This is the major premiss for practically every syllogism of our critic. Where it does not come in—between vernacular and vernacular, between Latin and Latin of the classical type—he can judge just judgment. Where it comes in, the more perfect his logic, the more inevitably vitiated is his conclusion.


19. Since I wrote this, an obliging correspondent, Mr P.G. Thomas of Liverpool, has suggested actual quotation of a passage of Bruni’s on prose style in his De Studiis et Literis. If I do not give this it is, first, because indulgence in quotation here is as the letting out of waters; and, secondly, because the tractate is translated in Mr W. H. Woodward’s well-known and excellent book on Vittorino da Feltre (Cambridge, 1897), where other matter of interest to us will also be found.

20. The connecting and explaining link, sometimes omitted, is to be found in Rhetoric—the close connection of which with Logic and Grammar is no puzzle, while the connection of poetry with it was then an accepted fact. It is rather dangerous to say that Savonarola, in connecting poetry with logic, was “tending towards the elimination of the Imagination in art.” The extremely equivocal nature of the word “Imagination” (v. vol. i. pp. 120, 165) needs constantly to be pointed out. In the ancient sense, Imagination is as much connected with Logic as anything else; in the modern, Savonarola probably never even thought of it.

21. Otherwise, De Divisione et Utilitate Omnium Scientiarum. I have read this in the Wittemberg ed. of his Philosophiæ Epitome (1596, 8vo). The passages quoted and referred to will be found at p. 807 sq. of this.

22. Vol. i. p. 380 sq.

23. Or, “a pretty old woman that of a girl,” the position of the epithet between the two nouns being ambiguous.

24. Geog. i. 11, 5, where he describes poetry as a rudimentary philosophy, providing an introduction to life, and educating pleasantly. I do not remember who first, or who successively, pointed this out before Shaftesbury, Advice to an Author, Part I. sect. 3, note sub fin. But Castelvetro (Op. Var., p. 83), and Opitz (v. inf., p. 361), among others, refer to it.

25. More especially p. 46 sq. (2nd ed.) The influence of the Somnium Scipionis of Macrobius may also have been considerable.

26. Politian’s critical faculty shows to more advantage here than in his attribution of the Epistles of the Pseudo-Phalaris to Lucian (see Bentley’s immortal Dissertation). He had almost better—from the literary point of view—have believed them genuine.

27. V. vol. i. p. 408.

28.

Aut telo, Summane, tuo traxere ruinam,
Aut trucibus nimbis aut iræ obnoxia Cauri,
Aut tacitis lenti perierunt dentibus ævi.
Dum ver tristis hyems, autumnum proferet æstas,
Dumque fluet spirans refluetque reciproca Tethys,
Dum mixta alternas capient elementa figuras,
Semper erit magni decus immortale Maronis,
Semper inexhaustis ibunt hæc flumina venis,
Semper ab his docti ducentur fontibus haustus,
Semper odoratos fundent hæc gramina flores.
Manto, 335-337, 342-348, p. 303, ed. cit. inf.

29. If anybody charges me with plagiarism from Mr Symonds’ “leaping,” I had rather plead guilty than quibble. The metaphor is too obviously the right and only one, for the peculiar motion of Politian’s verse, to any one who has an ear. I keep, however, the order of the edition I use (that of Signor Isidoro del Lugo, Florence, 1867), not the perhaps more logical one of Nutricia—Rusticus—Manto—Ambra, which Mr Symonds followed and which is that of Pope, op. cit. inf.

30. My copy is the edition of Gryphius (Lugduni, 1554). Crinitus (Ricci or Riccio) had dedicated it nearly fifty years earlier, and just before his own death, I believe, to Cosmo Pazzi, Bishop of Arezzo, on November 1, 1505.

31. A fellow-citizen and contemporary printer generally appears in biographical dictionaries under the heading “Olmucensis.” The history of Olmütz, by W. Müller (Vienna, 1882), has not come in my way, so I do not know whether Augustinus appears there. The Dialogus is duly in Hain, but has not, I think, been much noticed by literary historians.

32. I have used the Opera, 2 vols., Lugduni, 1531, 8vo. The passages cited will be found at ii. 14 sq.

33. For Landi or Lando, see an interesting paper by Mr W. E. A. Axon, in vol. xx. of the Transactions of the Royal Society of Literature.

34. This, which is very amusing, opens the ed. of Berni’s Opere in the Sonzogno collection (Milan, 1888).

35. For the Latin I use Pope’s Selecta Poemata Italorum (2 vols., London, 1740), i. 131-189, and the anonymous Poemata Selecta Italorum (Oxford, 1808), 207-266; for Pitt’s Englishing, Chalmers’s Poets, xix. 633-651. The original is Rome, 1527, 4to.

36. Prof. A. S. Cook (Boston, 1892).

37. Insignis facie ante alios, ed. Oxon., p. 215.

38. For a very interesting and characteristic view of this “invoking” in the next generation, see Castelvetro, Op. Var., ed. cit. inf., pp. 79-99.

39.

Drances ... consiliis non futilis auctor,
Dives opum, pollens lingua et popularibus auris.
... Neque enim in Latio magno ore sonantem
Arma ducesque decet tam viles decidere in res.

It is interesting to hear the watchword “Low!” so early.

40. Some would plead for “mosaic.” But the mosaic worker works his tiny cubes himself—he does not steal them ready made and arranged.

41. Cf. Poet., ii. 162. Semper nutu rationis eant res.

42. Mr Spingarn’s useful chronological table gives twenty-five books by nearly as many different authors for the seventy-three years. Nor does this list pretend to be exhaustive; for instance, it omits Robortello’s Longinus (1554), and the important De poetis nostrorum temporum of Lilius Giraldus.

43. Dolce’s (1535) translation of Horace; Pazzi’s (1536) of Aristotle; Daniello’s Poetica (1536), and Tolomei’s Versi e Regole (1539).

44. Robortello’s ed. of Poetics (1548), and Segni’s translation (1549); Maggi’s ed. (1550); Muzio’s Arte Poetica (1551); Giraldi Cinthio’s Discorsi (1554).

45. Minturno’s Latin De Poeta (1559); Victorius’ Aristotle’s Poetics (1560); Scaliger’s own Poetics (1561); the completion of Trissino (1563); Minturno’s Italian Arte Poetica (1564), and Castelvetro’s Poetics (1570).

46. The work of Piccolomini and Viperano.

47. That of Patrizzi, Tasso, and Denores.

48. That of Buonamici, Ingegneri, and Summo.

49. But most of this latter part had been written in 1548-49, and all must have been before 1550, when Trissino died. Even this, however, leaves a twenty years’ gap, which Trissino attributes to the composition of his great (or at any rate large) poem on the Goths.

50. 2 vols., Verona, 1729.

51. All these, with the Poetica and the translation of Dante, will be found in the second volume of the edition cited. I take the opportunity of correcting an injustice to Trissino which I committed at i. 417, and which was brought to my notice by a reviewer in the Athenæum. “Giovan- [or Giam-] battista Doria” does say, in his dedication to the Cardinal de' Medici, that Dante wrote it in Latin, adding, however, a clause of such singular obscurity that at first sight one takes it as meaning that Dante himself translated the book into Italian. For discussion of this see Rajna’s ed. of the De V. E., p. li sq.

52. II. 95. Perhaps better “unlearned,” indotti Poeti.

53. Spingarn, p. 92.

54. Et ancor oggi si fa.

55. Spingarn, p. 102.

56. The discussion occupies nearly four quarto pages, ii. 127-130. Trissino, of course, does not neglect Quintilian’s handling of the subject in Inst., vi. 3, and he quotes modern as well as ancient examples.

57. Dolce had translated the Ars Poetica of Horace into Italian the year before.

58. Mr Spingarn has extracted from MS., and published as an appendix to his book, an interesting review of these commentators and others, by Leonardo Salviati, a successor of theirs in 1586, and too famous in the Tasso controversy.

59. Maggi in his commentary. See Spingarn, p. 27.

60. V. infra, p. 71.

61. Discoveries, sub fin. (iii. 419 of Cunningham’s 3 vol. ed.)

62. On him see also note infra, pp. 49, 50.

63. M. Breitinger (Les Unités d’Aristote avant Corneille, p. 7) says, “ce livre n’est qu’un commentaire du Canzoniere de Pétrarque.” He can hardly have read it; and most probably confused it with the Spositione by Daniello which accompanies an edition of Petrarch (Venice, 1549), and had been partially published eight years earlier. This is a full but rather wooden commentary, chiefly interesting to contrast with Castelvetro’s, and as showing the Italian tendency to expatiate rather than to appreciate.

64. Fracastorii Opera, 2 vols., Lyons, 1591. The Naugerius is at i. 319-365.

65. A few of these poems of Navagero will be found in Pope’s Selecta Poemata Italorum (Londoni, 1740); more in the Oxford Selection (1808); most in Carmina Quinque Illustrium Poetarum (Florence, 1552).

66. Rime Diverse (Venice, f. 68-94). The name on the title-page is Mutio, and the spelling Muzio, which some books have, may lead to confusions; for there appears to be another Rime Diverse of Muzio four years earlier, which does not contain the Arte. This is in blank-verse, agreeably written, with some general observations on Poets and Poetry, Ancient and Modern, and practical enough. Says Mutio, e.g.,—

La catena
Di Dante non e leggiadra, se non
Fa punto con la terza sua rima.

67. Delia Lingua Toscana. The four Books of this are rather empty things. The first goes to show that Philosophy is necessary to the perfect orator; the second that it is equally necessary to the perfect poet; the third that Rhetoric is useful for writing and speaking with eloquence; while the fourth discusses oratorical diction and its ornaments. Few of the books cited here better justify De Quincey’s too sweeping ban.

68. Due Dialogi dell' Inventione Poetica di Alessandro Lionardi (Venice, 1554). No one carries the ventosa loquacitas about the origin of laws, and virtues, and opinions, and what not, farther than Lionardi; no one is more set on defining “the Historian,” “the Orator,” “the Poet,” &c.; no one pays more attention to all the abstractions. At p. 18 he has a curious catalogue, occupying the greater part of a small quarto page, and capable of being extended to a large folio, or many large folios, of “subjects” and “effects,” in regard to history, enmity, discord, war, peace; in short, all the contents of the dictionary. “Perdonatemi,,” says another interlocutor, “se interrompo i vostri ragionamenti,” and indeed they might have gone on for ever. But the new man has his catalogue ready, too.

69. Venice, 1562. It is very short and very general. There are some literary touches in his Lettere (2 vols., Venice, 1562), especially a correspondence with Cinthio on the Amadigi.

70. Della Vera Poetica, Venice, 1555.

71. His volume appears to be almost introuvable for sale; but the British Museum has no less than three copies. I wish it would give me one of them.

72. Especially in those to La Strega and l’Arzigoglio (Commedie di A. Grazzini, ed. Fanfani, Florence, 1897), pp. 173 and 435. Gelli and others do much the same.

73. The proper quotation is imitatio vitæ, speculum consuetudinis, imago veritatis. It is given as early as by Robortello (see note opposite). But with that intelligent operation of the communis sensus which pedants dislike, speculum vitæ was what took the general.

74. In Prose Scelte di P. Bembo, ed. Costero (Milan, 1880), pp. 141-278.

75. Ed. Costero, 2 vols. (Milan, 1879 and 1884).

76. Ed. Costero (Milan, 1888).

77. Robortello edited Ælian and Æschylus as well as Longinus and Aristotle; Petrus Victorius was busied very widely with the classics. The combined treatment of Aristotle and Horace by the former in his Explicationes (Basle, 1555) is distinctly noteworthy. His dealings with the Greek are almost pure commentary; those with the Roman, though called a “Paraphrase,” are much freer. He begins with a sort of expository lecture on the Epistola ad Pisones, introducing most of its matter and much illustration from other authors. Then separate short essays follow on Satire, Epigram, Comedy, Sales, and Elegy. The heading “Sales” is especially worthy of attention as illustrating that tormenting preoccupation of the classics on Wit, which transmitted itself to the Renaissance, and is found in moderns as recent as Whately. Robortello exercised much authority, and is shown by M. Morel-Fatio in his recent edition of Lope de Vega’s Arte Nuevo (v. infra, p. 343) to have furnished the Spanish poet with much, if not most, of the miscellaneous erudition which he displays to no great purpose. Robortello’s earlier editio princeps of Longinus (ibid., 1554) is noteworthy in a different way. He was by no means more modest than the average Renaissance scholar; on the contrary, he is accused of special arrogance. But this opus redivivum, antea ignotum, e tenebris in lucem editum, as he calls it, seems to have puzzled, if not actually abashed, him. He has no introduction, no regular commentary: only side-headings of the matter, from which, he says, “all the method of the book, and the order of the questions treated, and the whole rationale of the teaching,” and much else, can be learnt. The spirit was too potent for him who had called it up. Of other mainly classical commentators, Riccoboni (Compendium Artis Poeticæ, 1591) is again useful, because he combines Horace and Aristotle, and practicalises the combination, identifying the Aristotelian or pseudo-Aristotelian (see vol. i. p. 34) “Episode” with the first Four Acts, the Exodus with the Fifth, &c. Maggi, Segni, Zabarella are even farther from our sphere.

78. Let, however, the reader beware of being misled by the occurrence of the word “Admiratio” in the side-notes of pp. 52, 53. It is used in quite a different sense.

79. Perhaps, if this be true, the Irish got it from their French friends of the seventeenth century, among whom, according to the Ménagiana, poeta regius was the correct title of the King’s Fool.

80. Ut doceat, ut delectet, ut moveat. Suggested by Cicero on the orator.

81. P. 173. Amatorio mollique sermone effeminat. See Spingarn, p. 70. It should, however, be observed that Minturno is here avowedly expressing the censure of Aristophanes on Euripides rather than his own opinion.

82. “Vain and amatorious.”

83. Minturno mentions neither Cinthio (v. infra) nor Pigna—probably to avoid the appearance of direct attack; but he must have been thinking of one or the other or both. Something the same line was taken by Sperone Speroni.

84. See next Book, p. 369.

85. Scritti Estetici di Giambattista Giraldi Cinthio, 2 vols., Milan, 1864. (In Daelli’s Biblioteca Rara.) This edition gives extracts from Pigna’s work, and documents respecting the quarrel.

86. To speak correctly, Seneca prefers (Agamemnon, Hercules Furens, H. Œtæus, Medea, Troades) to compose the First Act of a soliloquy and a chorus. This, when the chorus is not present, becomes of course a monologue. In the Hippolytus, Octavia, Thebais, and Thyestes, there is dialogue in the first Act. But, even of these, the first two begin with a lyrical monologue, which is in effect a first Scene.

87. Aristotle’s Theory of Poetry and Fine Art, p. 232.

88. Venice, 1554, 4to.

89. For the neat little edition of this by Karl Wotke (Berlin, 1894) one must be thankful, and also for the careful bibliographical introduction on recent work concerning Renaissance Literature.

90. Op. cit., pp. 62, 63, 70. Giraldus also knows Colet, Grocyn, and others of the set.

91. “Fuere“Fuere et in Britannorum idiomate et eorum vernaculo sermone aliqui poetæ ab iis summo in pretio habiti, inter quos Galfridus Chaucerus qui multa scripsit, et Thomas Viatus.” That he adds ambo insignes equites” is very pardonable.

92. Not merely northern Humanists like Reuchlin, Erasmus, Eobanus Hessus, and Hutten, not merely Greeks from Gemistus Pletho to Musurus and Lascaris, but foreign vernacular writers like Ressendi, Juan de la Mena, Marot, Martial d’Auvergne receive notice.

93. The supposed date of the conversation is, as usual in such case, thrown a good deal back.

94. He allows him (p. 18, ed. cit.) “sweetness and wit,” but says nescio quare as to the contemporary praise of the Hermaphroditus, and adds plumply, nec poeta bonus nec bonus orator. The simple fact is that, if the subjects of this notorious book were decent, nobody would see anything but quite ordinary merit in their treatment.

95. Ed. cit., p. 25.

96. As a rough but not misleading gauge of this it may be mentioned that Herr Wotke’s Namenregister contains for less than 100 printed pages, between four and five hundred entries, including, besides those noticed in the text, names like those of Olympia Morata and Bilibald Pirkheimer, Castiglione and Alciati, Conrad Celtes and Paulus Jovius, Cardinal Perotti and Jacob Wimpheling. In fact, hardly any one in Europe who had to do with belles lettres seems to have been outside the cognisance, in closer or vaguer kind, of Giraldus.

69

CHAPTER III.

SCALIGER, CASTELVETRO, AND THE LATER ITALIAN
CRITICS OF THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY.

JULIUS CÆSAR SCALIGER—THE ‘POETIC’—BOOK I.: ‘HISTORICUS’—BOOK II.: ‘HYLE’—BOOKS III. AND IV.: ‘IDEA’ AND ‘PARASCEVE’—BOOKS V. AND VI.: ‘CRITICUS’ AND ‘HYPERCRITICUS’—BOOK VII.: EPINOMIS—GENERAL IDEAS ON UNITY AND THE LIKE—HIS VIRGIL-WORSHIP—HIS SOLID MERITS—CASTELVETRO—THE OPERE VARIE—THE ‘POETICA’—ON DRAMATIC CONDITIONS—ON THE THREE UNITIES—ON THE FREEDOM OF EPIC—HIS ECCENTRIC ACUTENESS—EXAMPLES: HOMER’S NODDING, PROSE IN TRAGEDY, VIRGIL, MINOR POETRY—THE MEDIUM AND END OF POETRY—UNCOMPROMISING CHAMPIONSHIP OF DELIGHT—HIS EXCEPTIONAL INTEREST AND IMPORTANCE—TASSO AND THE CONTROVERSIES OVER THE ‘GERUSALEMME’—TASSO’S CRITICAL WRITINGS AND POSITION—PATRIZZI: HIS ‘POETICA’—THE ‘DECA ISTORIALE’—THE ‘DECA DISPUTATA’—THE ‘TRIMERONE’ ON TASSO—REMARKABLE POSITION OF PATRIZZI—‘SED CONTRA MUNDUM’—THE LATEST GROUP OF SIXTEENTH-CENTURY CRITICS—PARTENIO—VIPERANO—PICCOLOMINI—GILIO—MAZZONI—DENORES—ZINANO—MAZZONE DA MIGLIONICO, ETC.—SUMMO.

In the remarkable little book, a notice of which concluded the last chapter, Lilius Giraldus, as we observed, includes—for their verse-work nominally, as became his title, but, with his usual acuteness, obviously perceiving that their importance lay elsewhere—both of the most famous and influential critics of the central sixteenth century in Italy. Julius Cæsar Scaliger. His reference to Julius Cæsar Scaliger (who was, indeed, not more than six years younger than himself) contains some touches (such as the mention of him by the name he took, but with the addition “qui primus Bordonus cognomine fuit,” and the 70description of his book on Comic Metres, as “arranged with such wonderful subtlety as not to be intelligible save to a reader well versed in the subject”) which are of doubtful friendliness, but allows the Veronese gladiator to be apprime eruditus and capable of carmina elegantia. For us nothing of Scaliger’s needs detailed notice except the once world-famous and still famous Poetices Libri Septem,[97] which appeared in 1561 after the death of Giraldus, and indeed after his own.

Scaliger was very much better qualified than Boileau to be législateur du Parnasse in the sense in which both understood Parnassus: or perhaps it would be better to say that without a Scaliger a Boileau would have been impossible. The Poetic. He had immense learning; he had absolute confidence in his own judgment; and within limits which, if they reduce his positive value, make him an even more complete and direct exponent of his own particular school and creed, he had great acuteness, an orderly and logical spirit, and a thorough command of method. Nothing (certain inevitable postulates being granted) can be more luminous and intelligible than the book, in which the author, through all his thousand pages, never loses sight, nor permits his reader to lose sight, of the subject, the process, and the goal. That he stands forth in the preface to his son Sylvius with an air of patronage at once paternal and pedagogic, announcing himself as the pioneer of the subject, dismissing those who allege Varro, as with levity ignoring the fact that neither Varro nor anybody else in antiquity did, or could do, anything of the kind: that he blandly sweeps away the plebs grammaticorum; that he labels the Ars Poetica itself as teaching adeo sine ulla arte ut saturæ propius esse videatur, Aristotle as fragmentary, Vida as optimus poeta in theatro, claudus magister in schola—is all of it agreeably Scaligerian in manner. But it is far from being untrue in fact. And there is a touch of sublimity in the Quare porro opera danda est nobis, “wherefore we must put our shoulders to the wheel,” with which he concludes. “Let others grub money, or canvass for office, or talk about the wars as parasite guests at dinner: we will let them alone, and simply defend the nobility of our 71studies, the magnanimity and simplicity of our purpose.” After this magnificent pose and draping, and before commendatory verses (the main copy being by no less a person than Etienne de La Boétie) comes a table of contents of antique clearness and solidity, filling nearly a dozen pages, by means of which, and of the more than sixty of index at the end, the study of the text is not a little facilitated.

The First Book has the special title, Qui et Historicus, which it deserves, if not exactly or exclusively in our sense of History. Book I.: Historicus. The critic begins, scholastically enough, with a distribution of everything into necessary, useful, or delightful, and proceeds to apply the classification in a beneficial manner to literary expression in general and Poetry in particular, ending the chapter with a characteristic gibe (for Scaliger is far from unhumorous) at the moderns who confine the appellation “Makers” to candle-makers.[98] Then he follows the safe road by discussing the causes (material, formal, &c.) of poetry; and indulges in a free review (for Scaliger, to do him justice, is paratus nullius jurare in verba) of ancient opinions. Hence he sets off to a full enumeration and examination, not merely of the kinds of poetry, but (in connection more especially with the drama) of the theatres and games of the ancients. Nothing escapes the extensive view of his observation, neither palinodes nor parodies, neither centos nor enigmas. And he is intensive as well as extensive. He rebukes, in his usual magisterial manner, the Græculas nugas of Plutarch, who explains the number of the Muses by that of the letters in the name of their mother, Mnemosyne; and as for Plato’s blame of poetry, respiceat ipse sese quot ineptas quot spurcas fabellas inserat.[99] The distinction of Poesis, Poema, and Poeta, which follows (and which many grave writers, including Ben, copy), we have often met in kind or in itself before, nor is it quite so meticulous as it looks. 72For Scaliger utilises it to stop the blunder of Plutarch and others, who make a distinction in kind between great poems and smaller ones. It is tempting but impossible to follow him through the multitudinous, though far from mazy, ramifications of his plan. It must be enough to say that he leaves few items of the dictionary of his subject untouched, and (however inclined one may be to cry “Halt and fight!” at not a few of his definitions) formulates them with a roundness and a touch of confident mastery which fully explain, and to some extent justify, the practical dictatorship which he so long enjoyed. As thus (at the opening of chap. vi. p. 27), “Tragedy, like Comedy established in examples of human life, differs from it in three things—the condition of the persons, the quality of the fortunes and actions, the end. Whence it is necessary that it should also differ in style.” And this legislative calmness is accompanied and fortified by a profusion of erudite example, which might well awe the disciple.

The second book, Qui et Hyle, gives us an important point at once, in the fact that this hyle—this “material” of poetry—is Book II.: Hyle. frankly acknowledged to be verse.[100] The entire book is occupied, at the rate of a chapter apiece, after the half-dozen general ones which open it, with almost every classical metre, if not from pyrrhic to dochmiac, at least from iambic to galliambic. A great number of interesting dicta might be extracted from this book—as, for instance, Scaliger’s remarkable distinction of Rhythm and Metre, as giving, the latter the more exact measure of the line, the former its continuity and “temperament.”[101]

73The third, Qui et Idea, is far longer than either of the preceding, and is less easily describable to modern readers. Books III. and IV.: Idea and Parasceve. Those who have read the first volume of this book with some care will understand it without much difficulty, if we call it a throwing of the traditional and technical treatment of Rhetoric into a form suitable to Poetry. Prosopopœia and ethopœia; the bearings or “colours” of time, place, race, sex, and the rest; the considerations of chance and manners and fortune; lead us to our old friends the Figures. To these, giving them the most liberal interpretation possible, so as to include fresh kinds of poetry as well as actual turns of speech, Scaliger complacently allows nearly a hundred out of the nearly hundred and thirty chapters of this overgrown Book, comprising by itself nearly a full quarter of the volume. Nor does even this devotion to Figures satisfy him, for the Fourth Book, Qui et Parasceve (preparation), beginning with the characters or distinctions of style, turns before long to more Figures, and is, in fact, a sort of Part II. of the Third. Naturally, there is no part of the book more difficult to analyse, but, as naturally, there is none in which analysis is less required. Scaliger luxuriates in his opportunities of sub-division and sub-definition; but he abounds ever more and more in those examples which we have recognised as, from the time of Hermogenes downwards, the “solace of this sin,” and the plentifulness of which in Scaliger himself would, even if they stood alone, go some way to atone for the absence of a larger examination of writers as wholes. And he does not allow us to lack even this.

Another pair of Books, the Fifth (Qui et Criticus) and the Sixth (Qui et Hypercriticus), together constitute the pith and body of the book in spirit, and occupy more than a third of it in space. Books V. and VI.: Criticus and Hypercriticus. It is here that Scaliger lets himself and his learning loose. The Fifth Book consists of a vast series of cross-comparisons, Homer with Virgil, 74Greeks with Latins, Virgil with Greeks other than Homer, Horace and Ovid with Greeks, Latins with other Latins, special subject-passages of the same theme from different authors. Its sequel, the Hypercriticus, undertakes, for the first time, an actual survey of belles lettres as Scaliger understood them, beginning, after an odd discussion of Plautus and Terence, with the Renaissance Humanists (many Italians and a few Germans and French), and then receding through three Ages (the Middle disdainfully excluded), to Catullus and Horace. Here, of course, one may, according to taste or temperament, most revel in, or most shudder away from, “criticism of criticism.” Here the citation is most opulent and useful. Here, above all, the most hostile judge must be forced to admire and acknowledge the erudition which not merely for the first time attempts, but for the first time completely meets the initial requirements of, a complete examination of poetic literature on a definite and reasoned basis. But here, inevitably, the weakness of Scaliger comes out most strongly, as well as his strength. Not only was his judgment warped in more ways than one by prejudice, but we are, with all the goodwill in the world, forced before long to conclude[102] that his taste itself was radically defective. Nor does this conclusion rest merely on his preference (anticipated by Vida and others, and almost an article of national faith) of Virgil to Homer. His estimate of Musæus also as far superior to Homer, as incomparable among Greeks, as “worthy of Virgil,” speaks this taste only too well; and the fearless good faith with which, disdaining the “guile that lurks in generals,” he quotes line after line as specially beautiful, delivers him into our hands, a respectable but self-convicted victim. After this the “coldness” and “childishness” and “unsuitability” of the Homeric epithet, the “semper-august” character of Virgil, and innumerable other things of the kind, disturb us not. Scaliger’s idol has spoken Scaliger’s doom in Qui Bavium non odit—not, of course, that Hero and Leander is itself by any means Bavian, but that it is so in comparison with Homer. Nearly a hundred pages are given up to this main comparison of Homer and Virgil. The 75others are shorter, but always result in the same dogged maintenance of the superiority of Latins to Greeks—that is to say, the same involuntary confession of Scaliger’s preference of Rhetoric to Poetry. It is interesting, however, to find him conducting his comparisons in a way in which, as in most other cases, posterity for two centuries thronged to follow him—the assemblage, that is to say, of passages on the same subject from different poets.

Still less can we abstract the curious and invaluable survey of the Hypercriticus. Not a little of it is actual review of actual contemporaries or very recent predecessors, and review of the ancients takes the same form, reinforced constantly by discussed quotations. Sometimes, as in the case of Juvenal, these are arranged into a little anthology of “jewels five words long,” strung together with acute et hoc, illud valde festivum, and the like appreciative interjections. His preference of Juvenal to Horace is seasoned with a characteristic fling at Erasmus (p. 876).

Book VII.: Epinomis.

Lastly comes an Epinomis or Codicil, which is divided into two parts, and takes up some of the special points of poetical or dramatic criticism then most interesting—the relative importance of action and character, the parts of tragedy, the Chorus, the metres most appropriate to the stage, and the like, ending with a sort of “gratillity” or bonus in the shape of an examination of a codex of Terence, which we could spare, at least in this place. More piquant, at least, are the diatribes de negligentia aut inscitia professorum, directed (with a show of respect) against Erasmus once more; the occasional flights, such as “Variety is the tirewoman of poetry”[103] (p. 906); the amusing references to mea poemata, which in some parts of the book he has obligingly, and once more with a fearlessness drawing nigh to rashness, exposed to the arrows; and other things which are perhaps here all the more numerous because the Book is an avowed Appendix, and, as it were, omnium gatherum. They are, however, plentiful everywhere; and if it were possible to revive the old periodical Literary Miscellanies of commonplace-book character—a thing which 76will have to be done sooner or later, if the accumulations of the last few centuries are not to became mere Nineveh-mounds, as yet unexplored—I should like to compose a florilegium of memorabilia out of Scaliger.

For in this great space, occupied with equal method and erudition, it could not be but that remarkable pronouncements on the more general questions of literary criticism, whether given obiter or in definite reference to argued questions, should emerge. General ideas on Unity and the like. Scaliger is, indeed, less set than most of his predecessors in Italian criticism, and than some at least of his successors, on these general pronouncements. “The disinterested and philosophic treatment of æsthetic problems wholly aside from all practical considerations,” as the tendency of Italian criticism has been rather unguardedly characterised,[104] does not seem to have had the first attraction for him. Yet he could not, in the wide sweep of his net, have avoided such questions if he would; and, with his fearless temper and eager literary interests, there is no reason to suppose that he would have avoided them if he could. He did not explicitly enjoin the Three Unities,[105] but he did more than any other man had done to inculcate that unfortunate notion of “verisimilitude”[106] from which, much more than from Aristotle, they were deduced. Not many words need be wasted (especially as the point will recur only too often during the volume) on the absurdity of this wresting of Incredulus odi. The whole arrangements of the theatre are invraisemblables, no matter whether you have electric light or cross-shaped laths with candles on them, marquises sitting on the stage or millionaires in stage-boxes, elaborate scenery or directions to the audience, “Here is Thebes.” You do not murder, or (if you can help it) make love, in real life, before a miscellaneous 77audience who have paid to see you do it; in real life you do not talk in any regular stage lingo that has hitherto been invented, whether the outward form of it be senarii, or fourteeners, or complicated rhymed stanzas, or doggerel, or couplet, or blank verse, or stage prose. The sixteenth century Globe, and the twentieth century Lyceum, are alike unlike any place in which one habitually performs any action of life from birth, through marriage, to death. That there is a stage verisimilitude, which it is dangerous or fatal to break, need not be denied. But neither Scaliger nor any of his successors in purism has proved that we are, or ought to be, any more shocked by Æschylus when he shifts from Delphi to Athens than by Thackeray when he transports us from Flanders to Chelsea.

We may venture indeed to suspect that Scaliger “had more wit than to be here.” One may frequently differ with him; but he seldom runs mad on mere theory. It is he, for instance, who, while, as we have seen, he lays down uncompromisingly that the material of poetry is verse, instances the Æthiopica as a perfect epic. Instead of confusing poetry and learning, as some have done, he holds the much more sensible position that learning is useful to a poet. He takes the hard-and-fast ethical view of the ends both of tragedy and of all poetry, and he believes firmly in the type. But he does not bemuse himself, as some had done and more were to do, in the explanation of katharsis, and the definition of the tragic hero.

His greatest and also his most pervading critical fault is that “deification of Virgil,” whereof, though by no means the inventor, he was the chief prophet to the best part of three centuries. His Virgil-worship. Let it be admitted (with every possible emphasis on the fact that it is no mere extorted admission but a genuine and spontaneous opinion) that anybody is free to admire Virgil or any one else as much as he likes. “She that is fair to him” is so, and there’s an end on’t. But if any one proceed, not merely to intimate indifference to other fair ones, but to find positive fault with them because they are not like her, then he becomes at once uncritical: still more so if he erect her qualities, features, style, into abstract virtues 78and positive truths, all opposites to which are sin and vileness. He may call “Simula Silene, nervosa et lignea Dorcas,” to take two only out of the famous list in the classic place of this matter. But he must not declare that a girl who has a straight Grecian nose is therefore ugly, or that softness and plumpness are not excellent things in woman. Scaliger does this. For him Virgil is, at once, the standard of excellence and the infallible touchstone of defect. Nay, he is actually a better Nature; a wiser but more perfect Creation, whereby you may save yourself the trouble of outside imitation, inasmuch as everything worth imitating is there better done than by Nature herself. It is impossible to exaggerate or caricature Scaliger’s Maronolatry: as the Highfliers did in the case of Defoe’s Shortest Way, he would cheerfully accept and indorse the most outrageous statement of it.

Grave, however, as is this fault, and seriously as it vitiates Scaliger’s attitude as a critic, there is no doubt that it served in itself as the backbone of that attitude, and gave it the stiffness which enabled it to resist at once argument and time. A cause of disquiet to some critics themselves, and a rallying-cry to most enemies of criticism, has been constantly found in the apparently floating and uncertain character of the completest critical orthodoxy. Longinus himself, perhaps the best exponent of that orthodoxy, has been and is charged with vagueness; and all those who follow him must lay their account with the same accusation. In the last resort we often cannot give a clear, definite, cut-and-dried reason for the faith that is in us, and we still oftener had better not try to do so. Scaliger and Scaligerism are in no such plight. Their Sortes Virgilianæ are ex hypothesi decisive, and of universal application. What is found in Virgil is good, is the best; what is different from Virgil is bad or mediocre; what is like Virgil is good in direct proportion to the likeness. This of itself gives confidence both to the critic and to his disciples.

Again, Scaliger, though he has no more right to arrogate Reason and Nature as on his side than the rest of his school, possesses, like all of the best of them, a certain sturdy prima facie common-sense. His solid merits. It is this which 79dictates his theory of dramatic verisimilitude; this which palliates some of his Homeric and other blasphemies. Though uncompromisingly moral, and by no means illogical (when you have once granted his bundle of postulates), he is not in the least metaphysical. The wayfaring man, with tolerable intelligence and a very little trouble, can understand him perfectly.

Still more unmixed praise can be given to him from other points of view. To any scholar his scholarship is singularly refreshing in its thoroughness and range; he really neglects nothing proper to his subject, though he may define that subject with a somewhat arbitrary hand. Agree with him or differ with him as we may, it is an infinite comfort to be brought thus in contact and confrontation with the actual texts—to exchange the paper symbols of “the poet,” “the dramatist,” “the satirist” in the abstract, for sound ringing coin of actual poetry, drama, satire, told down on the counter, and tested by file and acid if required. The literary atlas of the Hypercriticus is, as has been said, the first attempt at a complete thing of the kind since Quintilian, and of necessity far more complete than his. In fact, Scaliger taught the school opposed to him—the school which after many a generation of desultory fighting at last worsted his own—the way to conquer. History and Comparison—the twin lights of criticism, the only road-makers across the abyss—are resorted to by him fearlessly. That he loses the best of their light, and twists the road in the wrong direction, by following Will-o'-the-wisps like his Virgil-worship, matters in detail but not in principle. He has practically come back to the safe way which Aristotle entered, but was precluded from treading far enough, which Quintilian and Longinus trod, but on which most of the ancients would not set foot. He has not found the last secret—the secret of submitting to History and to Comparison; he still looks upon both as instruments to be used merely under the direction of, and in subordination to, the purposes of a priori theory. His neglect of the vernaculars is not only wrong, but by his time absurd. His minor prejudices (as against Erasmus) are sometimes contemptible. His actual taste, as has been said, was 80probably neither delicate nor versatile. But he has learning, logic, lucidity within his range, laborious industry, and love of literature. The multitude which followed him followed him partly to do evil; but it would have been a surprise, and almost a shame, had so bold and capable a leader lacked a multitude of followers.

As has been said, Lilius Giraldus also refers to Lodovico Castelvetro, who at least resembled Scaliger in the characteristic Ishmaelitism of the Renaissance critic. Castelvetro. His quarrel with Caro, also already referred to, was unluckily, we must not say distinguished, but marked, by unfair play on the part of his adversary, who “delated” him to the Inquisition for heresy; and Castelvetro had to fly the country. His most important work appeared late, the famous edition and translation, with commentary, of the Poetics[107] not being published till a year before his death. “He was of his nature choleric,” says his biographer; and he bestowed a good deal of this choler not merely upon Caro, but upon the majestic Bembo and others. Yet Castelvetro was a very remarkable critic, and perhaps deserved the ascription of actual critical genius better than any man who has yet been mentioned in this volume. It is but for chequered righteousness that his practically certain formulation of the Three Unities can be counted to him; but, as we shall see, he has other claims, from which it is not necessary to write off anything.

His impartial attachment to both classical and vulgar tongues ranks him, of itself, in a higher sphere than that of Scaliger; and a certain impetuous, incalculable, prime-sautier genius puts 81him higher still. Even contemporaries seem to have recognised this in him, though they sometimes shook their heads over its pronouncements.[108] It may, indeed, sometimes seem that these pronouncements are, if not inconsistent, difficult to connect by any central tie-beam of critical theory. But this is almost inevitable in the case of a critic whose work takes the form, not of regular treatises on large subjects, nor even of connected essays on separate authors and books, but of commentaries and adversaria, where the passage immediately under consideration is uppermost in the writer’s mind, and may—not illegitimately in a fashion—induce him to display a facet of his thought which does not seem logically connected with other facets. This peculiarity is perhaps the only excuse for the depreciation of Dacier, who, reinforcing his native dulness with the superciliousness of a Frenchman in the later years of Louis XIV., accused Castelvetro of ignorance, and even of contradiction of Aristotle. The fact is, that Castelvetro is first of all an independent critic, and that, though there are few less common, there are no more valuable critical qualities than independence, even when it is sometimes pushed to the verge of eccentricity, providing only that it is sincere, and not ill-informed. It seems to me uncharitable, if not flagrantly unjust, to deny Castelvetro sincerity, and either impudent or ignorant to deny him information.

But he had also acuteness and taste. I do not know a better example in little of the latter quality at the time than his short and scornful description[109] of a preposterous comparison by another critic, Bartolommeo Riccio, between the “Sparrow” of Catullus and a pretty but commonplace poem of Navagero on a dog. The Opere Varie. One may sigh over the ruling passion, not to say the original sin, of critical man, on passing from this to a tangle of recrimination and “that’s my thunder” which follows with reference to Riccio and Pigna and Cinthio. But this passes again into a solid discussion on 82the material and form of poetry, and on the office of the Muses. Many of these animadversions are, as we should expect, purely verbal, sometimes not beyond the powers of the grammaticuccio, of whom Castelvetro himself not unfrequently talks with piquant scorn. But the comfort of finding annotations on Virgil alternating with discourses on Dante, like that of placing a quarto on Petrarch side by side with one on Aristotle, more than atones for any occasional hair-splitting. We are at last in the Jerusalem of general Literature which is the mother of us all, which is free and universal; not in this or that separatist Samaria or exclusive Hebron. The Platonic annotations, which are numerous, are important, because they show just the other side of Castelvetro’s talent from the merely verbal one—almost the whole of them being devoted to the exposition and illustration of meaning. It is a great pity that he did not work his notes[110] on the Gorgias (which he regards expressly as Plato’s Rhetoric) into a regular treatise of contrast and comparison on this subject between Aristotle and Plato. But all these notes show us the qualification of the commentator to deal with so difficult a subject as the Poetics.

The stout post quarto, with its vignette of an exceedingly determined-looking owl standing on a prostrate pitcher and hooting Kekrika, is dedicated to Maximilian II. The Poetica. It is arranged on a system equally simple and thorough. First comes a section of the Greek Text; then a short Italian summary of its contents; then the Italian translation; and then the spositione—the Commentary—which may be long or short as circumstances require. Often, on a Greek text of a few lines, it will run to as many quarto pages, full-packed with small print. Not the least advantageous part of this quadripartite arrangement is that the summaries—being, though very brief, to the point—are capable of being put together as a table of contents. This, however, but partially applies to Castelvetro’s commentary, which is often not a little discursive from the text. The defect was, however, supplied in the second edition by an elaborate index specially devoted to the Spositioni, and consisting, not of mere words or names 83with page references, but of reasoned descriptions of the subjects, as thus—

"Allegrezza.
Come nasca dalla tristitia, che si sente del male del giusto, e del bene del malvagio.
oblica, che si prende dalla miseria, o dalla felicita altrui qual sia,” &c. &c.

This is a great help in tackling Castelvetro’s text, the book containing some seven hundred pages, of perhaps as many words each.

No analysis of a book of such a size, so necessarily parasitic or satellitic on another in general run, and yet branching and winding with such a self-willed originality of its own, is possible. On Dramatic conditions. One might easily write a folio on Castelvetro’s quarto. Here we can only, as in most other cases now, except those of books or parts of books at once epoch-making in character and moderate in bulk, give an idea of the author’s most important views on general and particular points. It was necessary, since Castelvetro is revolving round Aristotle, that the greater part of his treatise should deal with the drama: and perhaps nowhere is that originality which has been praised more visible than here, whether it lead him wrong or right. He has undoubtedly made a step, from the mathematical towards the æsthetic view of literature, in conditioning, as he does, his view of the Drama by a consideration of the stage. To literary a-priorists this is of course horrible; to those who take the facts of literature, as they take the facts of life, it is a welcome and reconciling discovery. The conditions of the Greek stage were admittedly such as can never be naturally reproduced, and therefore, however great and perfect the Greek Tragedy may be in its own way, it cannot usurp the position of “best in all ways”; and can still less pretend to dictate to other kinds that they shall not be good at all in ways different from its own.

If the details of Castelvetro’s theory do not always correspond in excellence to the sense and novelty of the general view, this is because he adulterates his notion of stage requirements with that unlucky “verisimilitude” misunderstood, which is the curse of all the neo-classic critics, 84and which comes from neglect of the Aristotelian preference of the probable-impossible to the improbable-possible. On the Three Unities. The huge Mysteries of the Middle Ages, which ranged from Heaven to Hell, which took weeks to act, and covered millennia in their action, did at least this good to the English and some other theatres—that they familiarised the mind with the neglect of this verisimilitude. But Castelvetro would have none of such neglect. His play must be adjusted, not merely in Action, but in Space and Time, as nearly as possible to the actual capacity of the stage, the actual duration of the performance.[111] And so the Fatal Three, the Weird Sisters of dramatic criticism, the vampires that sucked the blood out of nearly all European tragedy, save in England and Spain, for three centuries, make their appearance. They “enter the critical literature of Europe,” as Mr Spingarn has very truly laid it down,[112] “from the time of Castelvetro.”

But to balance this enslaving of the Drama (in which he far exceeds Aristotle), Castelvetro frees the Epic from Aristotelian restrictions in an almost equally important manner. On the freedom of Epic. From his references in the Opere Varie to Cinthio and Pigna, it would appear that he claimed, if not priority, an even portion with them in the consideration of the subject of Epic Poetry. And though not agreeing with them altogether, he certainly agrees with them in enlarging the domains of the Epic. Poetry, he says in effect,[113] may do anything that History can do; and, like the latter, it may deal, not only with one action of one man, but with his life-actions, or with many actions of many men.

With Castelvetro, however,—and it is probably the cause why pedants like Dacier undervalue him,—both the character of his compositions, and probably also the character of his mind, draw him much more to independent, though by no means always or often isolated, critical aperçus and judgments, than to theoretical discourses, with or 85without illustration. His eccentric acuteness. To put it differently, while there is usually a theory at the back of his appreciations, the appreciation generally stands in front of the theory. But however this may be, that quality of “unexpectedness,” in which some æsthetic theorists have found such a charm, belongs to him as it does to few critics. One might, for instance, give half-a-dozen guesses to a tolerably ingenious person without his hitting on Castelvetro’s objection to the story of Ricciardetto and Fiordispina in the Orlando.[114] That objection is not moral: not on the ground of what is ordinarily called decorum: not on that of digression, on that of improbability generally, on any other that is likely to occur. It is, if you please, that as Fiordispina was a Mahometan, and Ricciardetto a Christian, and as Christians and Mahometans do not believe in the same kind of Fauns and Fairies, as, further, Fauns do not eat ladies or goddesses, whether alive or dead, Ricciardetto’s explanation of his alleged transformation of sex is not credible. In a modern writer this would look like an absolute absence of humour, or like a clumsy attempt at it; and I am not prepared to say that humour was a strong point with these Italian critics as a rule. But Castelvetro strikes me as being by no means exceptionally unprovided with it: and such a glaring lapse as this is probably due to the intense seriousness with which these critical questions, new as they were, presented themselves to him and to his class.

They get, as was once said, “into logical coaches”; and are perfectly content to be driven over no matter what minor precipices, and into no matter what sloughs of despond, so long as they are not actually thrown out. Yet Castelvetro at least is never dull. At one time[115] he compares the “somnolent indecorum,” the sconvenevolezza sonnachiosa, of Homer to the practice of German innkeepers (whether observed by himself in his exile, or taken from Erasmus, one cannot say) in putting the worst wines and viands on the table first, and the best later. Elsewhere[116] he gives a very curious reason against that other sconvenevolezza (this sonorous word is a great favourite with him) which he too saw in the use of prose for tragedy—namely, that in reciting verse the speaker naturally raises his voice, 86and so makes it more audible to the audience. He has been blamed for adopting the notion of rank being necessary to tragic characters, but on this see ante (p. 61).

His irreverent independence in regard to Virgil is noticeable in a critic of his time, and of course especially so if one comes Examples: Homer’s nodding, prose in tragedy, Virgil, minor poetry. to him straight from Scaliger. It would not be fair to represent him as a “Virgiliomastix,” but his finer critical sense enables him to perceive the superiority of Homer, in respect of whom he goes so far[117] as to say that Virgil “is not a poet.” But this—per se, of course, excessive—had been provoked by the extravagance of Maronolatry from Vida downwards: and Castelvetro does not scruple to praise the Mantuan for his grasp, his variety of phrase, and other good things. He has an extremely sensible passage—not novel to us, but by no means a truism to his contemporaries or to a good many poets still—on what he who publishes miscellaneous poetry has to expect. By the publication, says this other Messer Lodovico, of a thing which nobody asked him for (cosa non richiesta) without any necessity, he publishes at the same time his confidence in himself, and affirms that the thing is good. “Which thing,” goes on Castelvetro in his pitiless critical manner, “if it be found to be faulty (rea) and blameworthy, it convicts him who publishes it either of malice or of folly.” Alas! for the minor bard.

His attitude[118] to the everlastingly vexed question of the connection of verse and poetry is very sensible, and practically anticipates, with less reluctant circumlocution, that of Coleridge, who in more things than one comes close to Castelvetro, and who probably knew him. The medium and end of Poetry. He does not here contradict Aristotle by denying that verse is un-essential to poetry. But he insists—and points out the undoubted truth that Aristotle’s practice, whatever his theory may do, admits this—that Verse is a kind of inseparable accident of poetry,—that it is the appropriate garb and uniform thereof, which cannot be abandoned without impropriety. And 87he takes up this attitude still more emphatically in regard to the closely connected, and still more important, question of the end of Poetry. Here, as we have seen, the great Master of Criticism temporised. Uncompromising championship of Delight. He did not doubt that this end was Delight: but in deference to idols, partly of the Cavern, partly of the Market-place, he yokes and hampers this end with moral improvement, with Imitation, itself for itself, and so on. Castelvetro is much more uncompromising. One shudders, almost as much as one rejoices, at the audacity of a critic who in mid-sixteenth-century calmly says, “What do beginning, middle, and end matter in a poem, provided it delights?”[119] Nay, Castelvetro has reached a point of view which has since been attained by very few critics, and which some who thought they had gained this peak in Darien first may be mildly chagrined to find occupied by him—the view that there are different qualities of poetry, suited to delight different qualities of persons and of mind.

How seldom this view has been taken all critics ought to know, if they do not. Even now he who climbs the peak must lay his account with stone-throwing from the garrisons of other points. That Burns administers, and has a right to administer, one delight to one class of mind, Shelley another to another; that Béranger is not to be denied the wine of poetry because his vintage is not the vintage of Hugo: that Longfellow, and Cowper, and George Herbert are not to be sneered at because their delight is the delight of cheering but not of intoxication; that Keble is not intrinsically the less a poet because he is not Beddoes, or Charles Wesley because he is not Charles Baudelaire—or vice versa in all the cases—these are propositions which not every critic—which perhaps not very many critics—will admit even in the abstract, and which in practice almost every critic falsifies and renounces at some time or other.[120] But they are propositions which follow fairly, and indeed inevitably, from Castelvetro’s theory of the necessary end, Delight, 88and the varying adjustment of the delighting agent to the patient’s faculty of being delighted.

He is perhaps less sound in his absolute condemnation of “knowledge” as material for poetry. He is right in black-marking Fracastoro from this point of view: but he is certainly not right in extending the black mark to Lucretius. The fact is, that even he could not wrench himself sufficiently free from the trammels of old time to see that in the treatment lies the faculty of delighting, and that therefore, on his own scheme, the treatment is the poetry.

There are few writers to be dealt with in this volume—none, I think, already dealt with—to whom it would be more satisfactory to devote the minutest handling than to Castelvetro. His exceptional interest and importance. He has been called by Mr Spingarn “revolutionary.” The term, in an American mouth, probably has no unfavourable connotation; but waiving that connotation altogether, I should be inclined to demur to it. Even the Vehmgericht (if one may rely on the leading case of Vgr. v. Philipson, reported by Sir Walter Scott) acquitted of High Treason those who had spoken evil of it in countries where its authority was not acknowledged, and indeed its name hardly known. Now, Castelvetro was dealing—as we must, for his honour as well as for our comprehension of him, remember that he dealt—with modern as well as with ancient literature at once, and instead of adopting the injudicious though natural separation of Minturno, or the one-sided treatment of Scaliger, was constantly exploring, and always more or less keeping in view, territories not merely in which Aristotle’s writ did not run, but which in Aristotle’s time were No Man’s Land and terra incognita. He can no more be regarded as a revolutionary or a rebel, in framing new laws for the new facts, than a man could be regarded in either light for disregarding the Curfew Law at the North Pole, or for disobeying sumptuary regulations as to the use of woollen in the tropics. His ethos is really that of the self-reliant, resourceful, and adventurous explorer, as he has been called—of the experimenter in new material and under new conditions. That the paths he strikes out sometimes lead to culs-de-sac—that the experiments he 89makes sometimes fail, is nothing more than is natural, than is inevitable in the circumstances.

More generally his value is great, and we may forgive him (especially since he did us little or no harm) the binding of the Unities on the necks of Frenchmen and Italians, in consideration of the inestimable service which he did in standing up for Epic—that is, Romantic—Unity of a different kind, and in formulating, in a “No Surrender” fashion, the doctrine of Delight as the Poetic Criterion. By doing this he not merely fought for the freedom of the long narrative poem (which, as it happens, has been a matter of minor importance, save at rare intervals, since his time), but he unknowingly safeguarded the freedom of the long narrative prose romance or novel, which was to be the most important new contribution of modern times to literature. Nor may it be amiss once more to draw attention to a more general merit still, the inestimable indifference with which he continually handles ancient and modern examples. Only by this—the wisest “indifference of the wise”—can true criticism be reached. It is an indifference which neglects no change of condition, which takes count of all features and circumstances, but which, for that very reason, declines to allow ancient literature to prescribe unconditionally to modern, or modern to ancient, or either to mediæval. As to this last, Castelvetro has, and could be expected to have, nothing to say: as to the others, he is more eloquent in practice than in express theory. But his practice speaks his conviction, and it is the practice by which, and by which alone, the serene temples of the really Higher Criticism can be reached.

The last third of the century provides only one author who deserves (though he has seldom received) at least equal attention with Scaliger and Castelvetro: but it has, like the second, a crowd of minor critics who must not be wholly passed over. Tasso and the controversies over the Gerusalemme. Moreover, it boasts—if such a thing be a subject of boasting—one equally famous and weary controversy, that over the Gerusalemme. This, which expects the critical historian as its prey, and will test his powers to the utmost if haply he may wrestle free of it at once without inadequacy and without tedium, we may 90dare first: may take the interesting single figure of Patrizzi or Patrici second, and then may sweep the rest into a conclusion, which will itself leave not a little summarising to be done in the Interchapter succeeding this Book.

Torquato Tasso was, in more ways than one, fated to the ordeal of controversy. His work would, in the already unfolded state and temper of Italian criticism on the subject of the “heroic poem,” have invited it in any case; but he had, in a manner, inherited the adventure. His father, Bernardo, as has been briefly recorded above, had himself taken much interest in critical questions; and after being at first a classicist, had come round to the position of Cinthio. It was Torquato’s object, by argument and example alike, to reconcile the combatants. His Discorsi did not appear till late in 1587;[121] but they are said to have been written some twenty years earlier, after the appearance of Minturno’s Italian book. His plan is as simply obvious—shall we say as obviously defective?—as that of the immortal contributor to the Eatanswill Gazette. He, too, “combined his information.” Some kind of Unity is to be imposed on the Romantic Variety; and though this Unity cannot possibly be the Aristotelian, it need not be quite such a different kind as that of Castelvetro. It is to be organic, but may permit itself the organs of a complex animal system.

Nor did Tasso stick to generalities; nor did he shrink from giving hostages to fortune, and his enemies, by embodying his ideas in practice. These ideas we have already seen floating in various critical minds from Fracastorius to Castelvetro. The “heroic poem”—for his theory and his example alike consecrated that word for use, instead of either “epic” or “romance,” for nearly two centuries—must not be pure invention, but must avail itself of the authority of history. It must be animated by religion, true religion—that is to say, Christianity. It must have the supernatural. The hero must be a pious and moral, if not necessarily faultless, character. It must not be too dogmatic—that the poet may be free. It must deal with ancient or modern history so as to be neither absolutely unfamiliar, nor too familiar in its atmosphere and manners. The 91persons, things, and scenes must be noble and stately. It will probably strike every one that this is an admirable receipt for a historical novel; and thus do we constantly find blind strivings at things that cannot yet get themselves born. But whether it is an equally good receipt for a poem may be doubted. Some of us, at least, have no doubt that the Gerusalemme, which is faithfully constructed in accordance with it, is not nearly so good a poem as the Orlando, for the graceless graces of which it was expressly devised to substitute something more orderly and decent.

The extensive and execrable controversy which followed did not, however, turn wholly, though it very largely turned, on the actual case of Ariosto v. Tasso. But, as usually happens, the partisans of the latter provoked it by unadvised laudations of him, and worse-advised attacks on his great predecessor. The Florentines had not, as such, any special reason for championing the “turnip-eating” Ariosto; but Tasso had offended the coteries of the Della Crusca, and a Della Cruscan chief, the Salviati already mentioned, took the field against the author of the Gerusalemme. He sallied forth in turn; and the bickering became universal. Five mortal volumes of the standard edition of Tasso appear to be occupied with an incomplete collection of the documents on the subject—a collection which I have not read and do not intend to read, but which whosoever rejoices in such things may, if he likes, supplement with all the Histories of Italian Literature from Tiraboschi downwards, and all the Lives of Tasso, especially those of Serassi in the eighteenth century and Solerti in the nineteenth.

The most important upshot of the controversy is not itself in dispute. The impregnable historical position of Cinthio was strangely neglected by both sides (except by Ishmaelite outsiders like Bruno and Patrizzi); nor was even the modified Aristotelianism and “Unitarianism” of Castelvetro, as a rule, attempted. Both sides swore fealty to Aristotle, and all debated what Aristotle meant—what Unity was. And, in spite of the exceptions, this was the condition in which the question was left to the next century.

The controversy, like that between Caro and Castelvetro, 92and (I fear it must be said) like literary controversies in general, did not pass off without a muddying of the waters. Salviati, Tasso’s chief adversary, and author of the dialogue L’Infarinato against him, had at first been a great admirer and almost flatterer of the Gerusalemme, had offered the author his friendship, had praised his scheme, and had actually proposed to celebrate it in that very commentary on the Poetics which Mr Spingarn (who has read it in MS.) describes as actually devoted to “undermining Tasso’s pretensions.” Exactly by what personal, or cliquish, or patriotic offences he was induced to take the opposite line, belongs to the obscure, dull, and disgusting history of these literary squabbles generally, and we need not concern ourselves with it. The points “for us” in the whole matter are, first, that the controversy shows the strong hold which a certain conception of criticism (whether the right one or not) had obtained of the Italian mind; and, secondly, that the main question on which it turned—“What sort of Unity heroic poems must have?”—“In what manner must the precepts of Aristotle be interpreted and adjusted?”—shows more than the shadow of coming Neo-Classicism. The path of safety and truth which Giraldi and Pigna had opened up many years earlier, and which even Castelvetro, Unitarian as he was, had been careful to leave open—the path starting, that is to say, from the positions that Aristotle had not all literature before him, and that the kinds of literature which he had not before him could not, therefore, be subject to his dicta—was now ignored or barred. Apparent diræ facies, the faces of the Unities, and there is nothing left to do, in the general opinion, but to wrangle about their exact lineaments.

The critical work of Tasso is far from inconsiderable, and only a sense of duty prevents the consideration of it here at greater length. Tasso’s Critical writings It consists[122] of the Discorsi which, as noted above, appeared at Venice (with divers Lettere Poetiche) in one of the thin small parchment-covered quartos for which the student of this literature begins, after a time, to feel a distinct affection. The much longer and 93later Discorsi del Poema Epico partly repeat, partly correct, partly expand, the earlier work; and sometimes stand in a curious relation to it.[123] But this by no means exhausts the tale. Tasso, nothing if not conscientious, appears to have taken his art in general, and his work in particular, very seriously indeed. He makes extracts from Castelvetro; writes on the Allegory of his own Gerusalemme, an Apology for it in dialogue, a formal Reply to the strictures of the Della Cruscans, a tractate in answer to Patrizzi’s defence of Ariosto, another on Poetical Differences, a long “Judgment of the Conquistata,” a discourse on the Art of the Dialogue. Also he has some curious considerations on three Canzoni of Pigna’s entitled Le Tre Sorelle, written in honour of Lucrezia Bendidio, and dealing with Sacred and Profane Love. These considerations have the additional interest of being addressed to Leonora d’Este, and of breathing a peculiar blend of that half-sensual, half-Platonic Renaissance rapture of which the great locus is the discourse assigned to Bembo at the end of Castiglione’s Courtier, with the religiosity which we more specially think of in Tasso. He has an elaborate lecture on a single sonnet of La Casa,—a great favourite of Tasso’s, and deservedly so as far as his serious poetry goes,—and some minor matter of the kind.

To the writing of this not inconsiderable corpus of criticism Tasso brought, besides his own genius and the interesting association of his creative power, really wide reading, and, as has been said, an indefatigable interest in the subject. and position. He exercised a good deal of influence in the time to come—both Milton and Dryden, for instance (the latter again and again), refer to his critical work. Yet it may perhaps be said without presumption that this criticism is rather more interesting to a student of Tasso, or to one who wishes to obtain at famous hands some knowledge of the Italian sixteenth century ethos in this kind without going any further, than to the student of criticism itself. Tasso is very fairly representative 94of it in its combination of Plato and Aristotle, in its anxiety to get general notions of poetry and poetic kinds, in its respect for the ancients, in its ethical turn. But he is rather more representative than original or distinct; and his criticism is not perhaps improved by the very natural fact that sometimes avowedly, and probably in most cases really, it is less a disinterested consideration of Poetry in general than an apologetic of the poetry of Torquato Tasso. And as that poetry itself, beautiful as it often is, is notoriously something of a compromise between the Romantic and the Classical, so the criticism which is connected with it is compromising and compromised likewise. Tasso has many interesting observations, intelligent aperçus, just remarks: he is a link, and a very early link, in the apostolic succession of those who have held and taught the great doctrine that poetry makes the familiar unfamiliar, the accustomed strange and new.[124] But he has not shaken himself free enough to gain the standpoint of his friendly antagonist Patrizzi, and to recognise, even imperfectly, that the secret of poetry is treatment poeticamente, and that only the historic method unfettered by rules will tell you what poeticamente has been and is, even thus leaving unknown what it will be.

At about the same time, however, a last, and the most vigorous, if not altogether the best informed, attempt was made to put the matter on this true historical basis. Patrizzi: his Poetica. A year (1586) before the publication of Tasso’s Discorsi, and of his Apologia, though long after the writing of the first, and not without reference to himself and the dispute between his partisans and those of Ariosto, there had been printed at Ferrara, in two parts, one of the most important and original of the numerous treatises which appeared during this half-century or more, under the title of Della Poetica. It was the work of Francesco Patrizzi (as he is generally cited in books, though both in the title-pages of this work, and in the signature of his Dedication, it is spelt Patrici). The inspiration of the book was, at least partly, due to the violent anti-Peripateticism 95of which Patrizzi was at this time the twin champion with Bruno;[125] and while we must no doubt thank this party spirit for being in great part the cause of the volume, there may be room for objecting that it somewhat obscures the pure critical value of the treatises. That value, however, remains great, and would be great even if there were nothing in the book but an ill-carried-out idea. For its idea is the basing of the inquiry into poetry, not on a priori discussion of the nature of the thing, and of its exponent the poet,—not on previous authority as to these questions,—but on a historical examination of extant poetical composition. It is, of course, true that an examination of the kind was ready at hand in Scaliger’s book. But nothing was further from Scaliger’s mind than to base his inquiry on this: on the contrary, it comes late, and is merely intended to supply illustration and texts for verbal criticism.

Patrizzi’s plan is quite different. His book consists of two parts or “decades”—La Deca Istoriale and La Deca Disputata; and though in some copies (my own is an instance) the cart is perversely put before the horse, this is evidently a mere stupidity of the binder, due to the fact that both books, which are separately paged and title-paged, are of the same year (1586), and perhaps to the other fact that the Dedication of the Disputata to Don Ferrando Gonzaga, Signor di Guastalla, is dated, while that of the Istoriale to Lucrezia d’Este, Duchess of Urbino, is not. But the very first line of the Disputata makes references to the other as already done.

That the “History of Poetry” of il gran Patricio, as his commendatory sonneteers love to call him, should be either completely exhaustive or impeccably methodical, it would be unreasonable to expect. The Deca Istoriale. There are 96indeed some surprising touches,[126] both of knowledge and of liberality, in his admissions of the Architrenius and the Anticlaudianus, of Marbod and Bede. But for the most part he confines himself to classic and scriptural authors; and his notices are rather those of a classical dictionary maker, or hand-list man, than of a critical historian in the best sense. Still, all things must have beginnings; and it is a very great beginning indeed to find the actual documents of the matter produced and arranged in any orderly fashion, even if we do begin a little in the air with Giubale and Giafeto, and end a little in the dark with Gaufredo and Guntero.

Only when he has spent 150 pages on this arrangement does Patrizzi pass to his Second Book, in which (once more in the true logical order) he arranges the productions of his poets in kinds, of which he is a generous and careful distributor. The much shorter Third deals with the kinds of verses; and the Fourth with the festivals and spectacles at which poetry was produced, the Fifth continuing this with special reference to Games and Contests. The Sixth deals with the singing of ancient poetry; the Seventh with its accompanying Music; the Eighth with Rhythm; the Ninth with the Chorus; and the Tenth with the persons who produced ancient poetry—rhapsodists, priests, actors, &c.

It is, of course, to be observed that all this is strictly limited to Ancient Poetry; indeed Patrizzi repeats the very words religiously in the title of every Book. The Deca Disputata. To support his examination with a further one of modern or even Italian “vulgar” poetry does not seem to have occurred to him. Perhaps, indeed—since he refers, as has been said, in the very first line of his second part to la lunga e faticosa istoria delle cose a poeti, a poemi, e a poetica spettanti as “condetta a fine” with a sort of sigh of relief—he may have thought that his readers would not stand it. But it is noteworthy that in this Decade he constantly cites Italian writers, and that the last forty pages of his Tenth Book consist of a Trimerone of 97controversy with Tasso himself, amicable (they were actually friends), but by no means unanimated.

The First Book of the Disputata is given up to the cause of poetry, which Patrizzi, again in accordance with Bruno, decides to be Enthusiasm (Furori[127]), relying much on Plato, especially on the Tynnichus passage (v. supra, vol. i. p. 20), and even a little on Aristotle. The Second Book attacks, with a good deal of acerbity, and some wire-drawing, but also with learning, acuteness, and common-sense, the Aristotelian doctrine of Imitation, and the philosopher’s order and distribution of poetic kinds. The Third follows this up by an inquiry whether, in a general way, Poetry is Imitation at all; the Fourth by one whether the poet is an imitator. And the conclusion of the three, enforced with great dialectical skill, and with a real knowledge of Greek criticism,—that of Plato, Longinus, and the Rhetoricians, as well as Aristotle’s,—is that Poetry is not Imitation, or at any rate that Imitation is not proper and peculiar to poets. In which point it will go hard but any catholic student of literature, however great his respect for Aristotle, must now “say ditto” to Patrizzi.

In his Fifth Book Patrizzi tackles a matter of far greater importance—for after all the discussion, “Is Poetry Imitation, or is it not?” is very mainly a logomachy. As Miss Edgeworth’s philosophic boy remarks, “You may call your hat your cadwallader,” when you have once explained that by this term you mean “a black thing that you wear on your head.” But the question of this Fifth Book, “Whether Poetry can be in prose?” is of a very different kind. It goes, not to words but to things, and to the very roots of them; it involves—if it may not be said actually to be—the gravest, deepest, most vital question of literary criticism itself; and on the answer given to it will turn 98the further answer which must be given to a whole crowd of minor questions.

On this point il gran Patricio has at least this quality of greatness, that he knows his own mind with perfect clearness, and expounds it as clearly as he knows it. His conclusion[128] is, “That verse is so proper and so essential to every manner of poetry that, without verse, no composition either can or ought to be Poetry.” This is refreshing, whether we consider that Patrizzi has taken the best way of establishing his dogma or not. He proceeds as usual by posing and examining the places—four in number—in which Aristotle deals with the question; and discusses them with proper exactness from the verbal point of view, dwelling specially, as we should expect, on the term ψιλὸς for prose. Then, as we should expect also, he enters into a still longer examination of the very obscure and difficult passage about the Mimes and the Socratic Dialogues. To say that the argument is conducted in a manner wholly free from quibbling and wire-drawing would perhaps be too much. Patrizzi—and his logic is certainly not the worse for it—was still in the habit of bringing things to directly syllogistic head now and then; and of this modern readers are too often impatient. But he does succeed in convicting Aristotle of using language by no means wholly consistent; and he succeeds still better in getting and keeping fast hold of that really final argument which made De Quincey so angry when Whately so forcibly put it[129]—the argument that from time immemorial everybody, who has had no special point to prove, when speaking of a poem has meant something in verse, that everybody, with the same exception, has called things in verse poems.

Our author’s acuteness is not less seen in the selection and treatment of the subject of his Sixth Book, which is the intimately allied question—indeed, the same question from another point of view—“Whether the Fable rather than the verse makes the property of the poem?” He is equally uncompromising on this point; and has of course no difficulty in showing—against 99Plutarch rather than Aristotle—that “fable” in the sense of “made-up subject” is not only not necessary to Poetry, but does not exist in any of the most celebrated poems of the most celebrated poets.[130] But he is not even yet satisfied in his onslaught on the Four Places. He devotes a special Book (VII.—it is true that all the constituents of this group of books are short) to Aristotle’s contrast of Empedocles and Homer, labelling the latter only as poet, the former as rather Physiologist. And with this he takes the same course, convicting Aristotle, partly out of his own mouth,[131] partly by citing the “clatter” (schiamaccio) which even his own commentators had made on this subject. And, indeed, at the time even the stoutest Aristotelians must have been puzzled to uphold a judgment which, taken literally, would have excluded from the name of poetry the adored Georgics of old, and the admired Syphilis of recent, times.

But, indefatigable as he is, he is still not “satiate with his victory,” and in the Eighth Book attacks yet another facet of the same great problem, “Whether Poetry can be based upon, or formed from, History?” This was, as we have seen, a question which had already interested the Italians much; and Patrizzi in handling it draws nearer and nearer to his controversy with Tasso, whom he here actually mentions. He has little difficulty in showing that Aristotle’s contrast between Poetry and History itself by no means denies historical subjects to the poet, and that Aristotle is not at all responsible for, or in accordance with, Plutarch’s extravagant insistence on “mendacity” as a poetic proprium. “All the materials comprised in Art, or Science, or study,” says he[132] (in that manner of his which we have already called refreshing, and which we shall meet again seldom in this volume), “can be suitable subjects for poetry and poems, provided that they be poetically treated.” Verily, a gran Patricio!

The subject of the Ninth Book is less important and more 100purely antiquarian, but interesting enough. It discusses the question whether ancient poetry necessarily involved “harmony” and “rhythm,” and what these terms exactly mean—dancing and gestic accompaniment being considered as well as music. Patrizzi decides, sensibly enough on the historical comparison, that all these things, though old and not unsuitable companions of poetry, are in no sense formative or constitutive parts of Poetry itself.[133]

The title-question of the Tenth Book is, “Whether the modes of Imitation are three?” He discusses this generally, and specially in regard to narrative and dramatic delivery of the poetic matter, and then passes in an appendix (which, however, he declares to be part of the book) to the Trimerone of reply to Tasso. The Trimerone on Tasso. This is a necessarily rather obscure summary, with some quotations, of a fuller controversy between the two, complicated by glances at the other literature of the Gerusalemme quarrel, especially at the work of Camillo Pellegrino.[134] To disentangle the spool, and wind it in expository form, is out of the question here. Fortunately the piece concludes with a tabular statement[135] of forty-three opposition theses to Pellegrino and Tasso. A good many of these turn on rather “pot-and-kettle” recriminations between Homerists and Ariostians; but the general principles of comparative criticism are fairly observed in them, and there is no acerbity of language. In fact, although on some of the points of the controversy Patrizzi took the Della Cruscan side, it does not seem to have interrupted his friendship with Tasso, who attended his lectures,[136] and whose funeral he attended.

The intrinsic importance of Patrizzi’s criticism may be matter of opinion; but it will hardly be denied that both its system and its conclusions are widely different from those of nearly all the Italian critics whom we have yet considered, though there 101may be approaches to both in Cinthio on the one hand and in Castelvetro on the other. Remarkable position of Patrizzi. The bickering with Aristotle on particular points is of much less importance than the constant implicit, and not rare explicit, reliance on the historic method—on the poets and the poems that exist, the ideas of poetry conveyed by common parlance, the body of the written Word in short, and not the letter of the written Rule. I am not sure that Patrizzi ever lays down the doctrine that “Rules follow practice, not practice rules,” with quite the distinctness of Bruno in the passage cited above.[137] But he makes a fight for it in a passage of the Trimerone,[138] and his entire critical method involves it more or less. If he does not quote modern literature much, it is obviously because the controversy in which he was mixing took its documents and texts mainly from the ancients; but he is so well acquainted with the modern literature, not merely of his own language, that he actually cites[139] Claude Fauchet’s Origines de la Poésie Française, which had appeared in 1581. That his interest in the whole matter may have been philosophical rather than strictly, or at least exclusively, literary is very possible—he was actually a Professor of Philosophy; but however this may be, he has hit on the solid causeway under the floods, and has held his way steadily along it for as far as he chose to go. Nay, in the sentence which has been chosen for the epigraph of this Book, he has kept it open for all to the end of Poetry and of Time.

There are, however, few propositions in literature truer than this—that it is of no present use to be wise for the future. Sed contra mundum. If a man chooses the wisdom of the morrow, he must be content for the morrow to appreciate him—which it does not always, though no one but a poor creature will trouble himself much about that. Patrizzi had a really considerable reputation, and deserved it; but in matters literary he was two hundred years in front of his time, and his time avenged 102itself by taking little practical notice of him.[140] The critical writers of the last fifteen or twenty years of the century are fairly numerous; and though none of them can pretend to great importance, the names of some have survived, and the writings of some of these are worth examination, certainly by the historian and perhaps by the student. But the general drift of them is usually anti-Patrician and pro-Aristotelian, in that very decidedly sophisticated interpretation of Aristotle which was settling itself down upon the world as critical orthodoxy. The latest group of sixteenth-century Critics. Among them we may mention one or two which, though actually earlier than Patrizzi, are later than Castelvetro, and will help to complete, as far as we can here attempt it, the conspectus of that remarkable flourishing time of Italian critical inquiry which actually founded, and very nearly finished, the edifice of European criticism generally for three centuries at least. The authors to whom we return are Partenio, Viperano, Piccolomini, Gilio da Fabriano, and Mazzoni; those to whom we proceed are Jason Denores, Gabriele Zinano, and Faustino Summo. This latter, who, with an odd coincidence of name, date, and purport, does really sum up the sixteenth century for Aristotle, and so govern the decisions of the seventeenth and eighteenth, had been immediately preceded in the same sense by Buonamici,[141] Ingegneri,[142] and others.

Partenio, like Minturno and some others, gave his thoughts on the subject to the world in both “vulgar” and “regular”;[143] Partenio. but the two forms, while not identical, are closer together than is sometimes the case, though there is in the Latin a curious appended anthology of translation and parallel in the two languages. He is rather a formal person (as indeed may be judged from his particular addiction to Hermogenes as an authority), but he is not destitute of wits. Throughout 103he quotes Italian as well as Latin examples, and refers to Italian critics such as Trissino; while in one place he gives something like a regular survey of contemporary Latin poetry by Italians from Pontanus to Cotta. He lays special stress on the importance of poetic diction; he thinks that Art can and should improve nature; but he is as classical as the stiffest perruque of the French anti-Romantic school in believing Aristotle and Horace to contain everything necessary to poetical salvation.

Viperano.

Viperano[144] (who by a natural error is sometimes cited as Vituperano) somewhere makes the half-admission, half-boast, scripsimus autem varios libros de variis rebus, and is indeed a sort of rhetorical bookmaker who oscillates between instruction and epideictic. This character is sufficiently reflected in his De Arte Poetica. He had some influence—even as far as Spain (v. inf.)

Piccolomini’s book,[145] which is a compact small quarto of 422 pages, differs in arrangement from Castelvetro’s merely in not giving the Greek—the particelle of the original in translation being followed by solid blocks of annotationi. Piccolomini. The author was of that well-known type of Renaissance scholar which aspired to a generous if perhaps impossible universalism; and as he puts this encyclopædic information at the service of his notes, they are naturally things not easily to be given account of in any small space, or with definite reference to a particular subject. That Piccolomini, however, was not destitute of acuteness or judgment to back his learning, reference to test passages will very easily show. He has not allowed the possible force of the μᾶλλον, for instance, to escape him in the Homer-and-Empedocles passage referred to a little earlier—indeed Maggi had put him in the right way here. But, in this 104and other cases, he is somewhat too fond of “hedging.” “We must remember this; but we must not forget that,” &c. The inspiriting downrightness of Scaliger on the one side, and Patrizzi on the other, is not in him; and we see the approach, in this subject also, of a time of mere piling up of authorities, and marshalling of arguments pro and con, to the darkening rather than the illumination of judgment.

The Topica Poetica of Giovanni Andrea Gilio da Fabriano[146] comes well next to Piccolomini, because the pair are characteristic examples of the two parallel lines in which, as we have seen throughout, Italian criticism proceeds during the century. Gilio. In plan it presents no inconsiderable resemblance to that work of our own Puttenham (v. infra) which followed it at no great interval; but it is, as its special title will have indicated to the expert, even more definitely rhetorical. In fact, it must be one of the very latest treatises in which, on the partial precedent of antiquity, Poetics are brought directly under Rhetoric. We actually start with accounts, illustrated by poetical examples in the vernacular, of the Deliberative, Demonstrative, and Judicial kinds; we pass thence to Invention, Imitation, and Style; and thence again to Decorum, the Proper, and so forth, all still illustrated from the vulgar tongue mainly, but with a Latin example here and there. And this finishes the short First Book. The longer Second is the most strictly “topical,” with its sections (at first sight bewildering to the modern non-expert mind) on Definition and Etymology, on Genus and Species, on Example and Induction, on Proceeding from Less to Greater and from Greater to Less, on Amplification, Authority, Custom, and Love. The Third is wholly on Figures of Speech, and the Fourth on Tropes or Figures of “Conceit.” The poetical illustration is all-pervading, and there is an odd appendix of sonnets from ladies of Petrarch’s time. The book is chiefly worth notice here because, as has been said, it is one of the latest—perhaps, with the exception of Puttenham’s own, the actually latest—of its special subdivision that we shall have to notice,—the subdivision, that is to say, in which 105the literature handled is absolutely subordinate to an artificial system of classification, in which the stamped and registered ticket is everything, so that, when the critic has tied it on, his task is done.

Giacomo Mazzoni is perhaps better known[147] than at least some of the subjects of this chapter, owing to his connection with Mazzoni. Dante. He first, in 1573, published at Cesena a brief Difesa di Dante of some fifty folios, in fairly large print, and followed it up fourteen years later with an immense Della Difesa, containing 750 pages of very small print without the index. The points of the actual Difesa are not uncurious—such as an argument that discourses on Poetry are not improper for the philosopher, and that Dante is a particularly philosophical poet, in fact encyclopædic. From the Imitation point of view the Comedy can be easily defended, as it is a real following of action, and not the mere relation of a dream: and as dealing with costume (manners) it is a comedy, not a tragedy or heroic poem. The Della Difesa, on the other hand, is a wilderness of erudition and controversy, arranged under abstract heads (“how the poets have conducted themselves towards the predicaments of Time and Place,” &c.), and diverging into inquiries and sub-inquiries of the most intricate character—the trustworthiness of dreams,[148] the opinions held of them in antiquity, the nature and kinds of allegory, Dante’s orthodoxy—in short, all things Dantean, and very many others. If I cannot with Mr Spingarn[149] discover “a whole new theory of poetry” in the Difesa itself, I am ready to admit that almost anything might be discovered in the Della Difesa.

The Poetica of Jason Denores[150] is remarkable from one point of view for its thoroughgoing and “charcoal-burner” Aristotelianism, from another for the extraordinary and meticulous 106precision of its typographical arrangements. How many sizes and kinds of type there are in Jason’s book I am Denores. not enough of an expert in printing to attempt to say exactly: and the arrangement of his page is as precious as the selection of his type. Sometimes his text overflows the opened sheet, with decent margins indeed but according to ordinary proportions; at others (and by no means always because he requires side-notes) it is contracted to a canal down the centre, with banks broader than itself. It is, however, when Denores comes to the tabular arrangement and subdivision of statement and argument, in which nearly all these writers delight, that he becomes most eccentric. As many divisions, so many parallel columns; under no circumstances will his rigid equity give one section the advantage of appearing on the recto of a leaf while the others are banished to the verso. This is all very well when the divisions are two or three or even four. But when, as sometimes happens, there are six or even eight, the cross-reading of the parallel columns is at once tempting and conducive to madness. As each column is but some half-inch broad, almost every word longer than a monosyllable has to be broken into, and as only a single em of space is allowed between the columns, there is a strong temptation to “follow the line.” By doing this you get such bewilderments as

“gue do-diEdip-di Laio, ttappas-menosia ra il Poe mu tio lipo, per,” &c.,

a moderate dose of which should suffice to drive a person of some imagination, and excessive nerves, to Bedlam. Read straight, however, Denores is much more sedative, not to say soporific, than exciting: and his dealings with Tragedy, the Heroic Poem, and Comedy have scarcely any other interest than as symptoms of that determination towards unqualified, if not wholly unadulterated, Aristotelianism which has been remarked upon.

Il Sogno, overo della Poesia, by Gabriele Zinano,[151] dedicated at 107Reggio on the 15th October 1590 to the above-mentioned Ferrando Gonzaga of Guastalla, is a very tiny treatise, Zinano. written with much pomp of style, but apparently unnoticed by most of the authorities on the subject. The author had studied Patrizzi (or Patrici, as he, too, calls him), and was troubled in his mind about Imitation, and about the equivocal position of Empedocles. He comforts himself as he goes on, and at last comes to a sort of eclectic opportunism, which extols the instruction and delight of poetry, admits that it can practically take in all arts and sciences, but will not admit fable as making it without verse, or verse without fable, and denies that both, even together, make it necessarily good. The little piece may deserve mention for its rarity, and yet once more, as symptomatic of the hold which critical discussion had got of the Italian mind, Zinano is evidently full of the Deca Istoriale and the Deca Disputata, but alarmed at their heresies.

Paolo Beni, the antagonist of Summo, the champion of prose for tragedy as well as for comedy, and a combatant in the controversy over the Pastor Fido, which succeeded in time, and almost equalled in tedium, that over the Gerusalemme, will come best in the next Book; and though I have not neglected, I find little to say about, Correa[152] and others.[153] Mazzone da Miglionico, &c. A sign of the times is the somewhat earlier I Fiori della Poesia[154] of Mazzone da Miglionico (not to be confounded with the above-mentioned Mazzoni), a tightly packed quarto of five hundred pages, plus an elaborate index. This is a sort of “Bysshe” ante Bysshium—a huge gradus of poetic tags from Virgil, Ovid, and Horace, arranged ready for anybody who wishes to pursue the art of poetry according to the principles of Vida. Here you may find choice of phrases to express 108the ideas of “going to bed for the purpose of sleeping,” of “black and beautiful eyes,” of “shoes that hurt the feet,” and of “horses that run rapidly.” It was inevitable that this manual at once and reductio ad absurdum of the mechanic Art of Poetical Imitation should come—indeed, others had preceded Mazzone, for instance Fabricius, in Germany (see next Book). But one cannot help invoking a little woe on those by whom it came.

Summo.

The twelve Discorsi[155] of Faustino Summo manage to cover as many questions in their 93 leaves: the end of Poetry; the meaning of the word philanthropia;[156] the last words (the purgation clause) of the Definition of Tragedy; the possibility of a happy ending; the representation of atrocities and deaths; the admissibility of true fables; the necessity of unity of action; the propriety of drama in prose; furor poeticus; the sufficiency of verse to make poetry; the legitimacy of tragi-comedy and pastoral; and the quality of the Pastor Fido. Summo gives us our last word here with singular propriety. He is not quite Aristotelian to the point of infallibility, and his orthodoxy is what may be called a learned orthodoxy—that is to say, he is careful to quote comments or arguments of many of the writers whom we have mentioned in this chapter and the last, from Trissino to Denores, and of a few whom we have not. But in him this orthodoxy is in the main constituted: it is out of the stage of formation and struggle; and it is ready—all the more so that many of its documents have already passed with authority to other countries and languages—to take its place as the creed of Europe.


97. My copy is the second edition (apud Petrum Santandreanum, s. l., 1581).

98. This joke requires a little explanation and adaptation to get it into English. The Latin is miror majores nostros sibi tam iniquos fuisse ut factoris vocem maluerint oleariorum cancellis circumscribere. In fact, Fattojo and Fattojano, if not fattore, do mean in Italian “Oil-Press” and “Oil-Presser.”

99. Scaliger goes so far as to say that “it would be better never to have read” the Symposium and the Phædrus, because of their taint with the Grœcanicum scelus.

100. The decision of this is all the more remarkable that Scaliger does not, as unwary moderns might expect, make verse the form of Poetry, but the matter. Feet, rhythm, metre, these are the things that Poetry works in, her stuff, her raw material. The skill of the poet in its various applications is the form. A very little thought will show this to be the most decisive negation possible of the Wordsworthian heresy—anticipated by many sixteenth-century writers, from Italy to England, and though not exactly authorised, countenanced by the ancients, from Aristotle downwards—that verse is not essential in any way.

101. One cannot help thinking that this distinction, which is quite contrary to those entertained by Aristotle and Quintilian, must have been influenced by the cadences of the modern languages—Italian and French—with which Scaliger was familiar. In both, but especially in French, the actual “measuring-off” of syllables was the be-all and end-all of metre, the easements provided in English and German by syllabic equivalence being in French refused altogether, in Italian replaced only by the more meagre aid of syncope and apocope.

102. As, even throughout the neo-classic age, very orthodox neo-classics admitted, especially in the “Musæus v. Homer” case.

103. Varietas poetices κομητικὴ, sicut Cypassis Corinnæ. The text has κομωτικὴ, which I do not find.

104. Spingarn, p. 172. “Disinterested treatment” of practical problems, such as poems certainly are, “wholly aside from all practical considerations,” sometimes leads to awkward results.

105. Mr Spingarn (p. 94) apparently states that he “formulated” them, but the gist of the next two pages fully corrects this slip or ambiguity; and he has himself pointed out with equal decision and correctness that the French assumption contained in the phrase, Unités Scaligériennes, is unfounded.

106. P. 365.

107. Vienna, 1570. My copy is the second enlarged and improved issue, which appeared at Basle five years later. I have also the companion edition of Petrarch (Basle, 1582), and the Opere Varie Critiche, published, with a Life, by Muratori, in 4to (Lione, 1727). Besides these he wrote an “exposition” of Dante, which was lost, and he is said, by Muratori, to have been never tired of reading, and discovering new beauties in, Boccaccio. Bentley, Diss. on Phal., ed. 1817, p. liii, defending Castelvetro against Boyle, says that “his books have at this present time such a mighty reputation, that they are sold for their weight in silver in most countries of Europe.” I am glad that this is not true now, for the Poetic by itself weighs nearly 3 lb. But Europe often makes its valuations worse. I have seen, though not bought, a copy for a shilling in these days.

108. See the curious remarks of Salviati, printed from MS. by Mr Spingarn (op. cit., p. 316). Salviati thinks that Castelvetro too often wrote to show off subtlety of opinion, and to be not like other people.

109. Op. Var., p. 83 sq.

110. Op. Var., pp. 288-306.

111. In fact, he subordinates the first to the other two. They make it necessary. In order to appreciate his views, it is necessary to read the commentary on all the Aristotelian places concerned, and also on that touching Epic.

112. P. 101.

113. Poet. d’Arist., p. 278.

114. Poet. d’Arist., pp. 585, 586.

115. Ibid., p. 576.

116. Ibid., p. 23.

117. Poet. d’Arist., p. 545. It is fair to say that the ban is only pronounced in reference to a single point—the management of speeches.

118. Ibid., p. 23.

119. Poet. d’Arist., p. 158.

120. It is perhaps well to meet a possible, though surely not probable objection “Do you deny ranks in poetry?” Certainly not—but only the propriety of excluding ranks which do not seem, to the censor, of the highest.

121. At Venice, but ad instanza of a Ferrarese bookseller.

122. These pieces form the major part of Cesare Guasti’s Prose Diverse di T. T. (2 vols., Florence, 1875).

123. For instance, my attention was drawn by Mr Ker to the fact that the description of the subject of the third original Discorso given at the end of the second (f. 24 original ed. vol. i. p. 48, Guasti) does not in the least fit the actual contents, while the missing matter is duly supplied in the later book (i. 162 sq., Guasti).

124. For instance in the opening of the first Discorsi (f. 2, verso): Variamente tessendolo, di commune proprio, e di vecchio novo il facevano.

125. Bruno himself, in more places than one, takes the same line; indeed his statement in the Eroici Furori, that “the rules are derived from the poetry, and there are as many kinds and sorts of true rules as there are kinds and sorts of true poets,” is the conclusion of the whole matter, and would have done his friend Sidney a great deal of good. (The passage may be found at p. 38 of the first vol. of the translation by I. Williams (London, 1887, or in the original, ed. Lagarde, p. 625).) But Bruno’s genius, as erratic as it was brilliant, could not settle to mere Rhetoric.

126. Especially when they are contrasted with the superciliousness (v. supra) of Lilius Giraldus and Scaliger.

127. It would be rather interesting to know whether the Furor Poeticus of the second part of the Return from Parnassus has anything to do with Patrizzi. There need be no connection, of course; but the correspondence of England and Italy at this time in matters literary was so quick and intimate that there might have been. Patrizzi’s book appeared in the probable year of Shakespeare’s going to London, and of the production of Tamburlaine. Bruno had then left England.

128. Deca Disputata, p. 122.

129. See Whately, Rhetoric, III. iii. 3, p. 216 (ed. 8, London, 1857), and De Quincey, Rhetoric (Works, ed. Masson, x. 131).

130. Deca Disputata, p. 134 sq.

131. Of course an Aristotelian advocate may justly point out that the Master after all only says μᾶλλον ἢ ποιητὴν, without absolutely denying the latter title to Empedocles.

132. Deca Disputata, p. 175.

133. Deca Disputata, p. 192.

134. Who had been pars non minima in the exaltation of Tasso and depreciation of Ariosto. See Spingarn, pp. 122, 123; and Serassi, Vita di Tasso (Rome, 1785), pp. 331-348.

135. Deca Disputata, pp. 246-249.

136. This was long after the publication of the Trimerone (1586), and when Patrizzi had been translated from Ferrara to a newly founded chair of Platonic Philosophy at Rome, V. Serassi, op. cit., p. 475.

137. P. 95.

138. Pp. 221, 222. Of course it is possible to take exception even to poeticamente—to ask “Yes; but what is this?” But the demurrer is only specious. The very adverbial form shifts the sovereignty from the subject to the treatment.

139. Ibid., p. 235.

140. The way in which Patrizzi is referred to after the lapse of a century by Baillet and Gibert (v. inf., p. 320) shows at once the sort of magni nominis umbra which still made itself felt, and the absence of any definite knowledge to give body to the shade. For his dealings with Rhetoric, see next Book, p. 329.

141. Discorsi Poetici, 1597.

142. Poesia Rappresentativa, 1598.

143. Della Imitatione Poetica, Venice, 1560; De Poetica Imitatione, ibid., 1565.

144. His De Arte Poetica seems to have first appeared at Antwerp in 1579: I know it in his Opera, Naples, 1606.

145. Annotationi di M. Alessandro Piccolomini nel Libro della Poetica d’Aristotele: Vinegia. The dedication to Cardinal Ferdinand dei Medici is dated Ap. 20, 1572, from Piccolomini’s native town of Sienna, where he became co-adjutor-archbishop. Some of Salviati’s MS. observations, printed by Mr Spingarn, seem to show that even Piccolomini’s contemporaries regarded him as a little too polymathic, while his Raffaella exhibits the less grave side of the Renaissance. But he was now getting an old man, and died six years later at the full three score and ten.

146. In Venetia, 1580. Why has Time, in the title-page woodcut of this, an hour-glass as head-dress, but a scourge instead of a scythe in his hand?

147. Milton had read Mazzoni, and cites him.

148. There is a large folding table of the causes and kinds of visions.

149. Op. cit., p. 124.

150. Padua, 1588. Denores (whose name is often separated into “de Nores”) was, like Patrizzi, a Professor of Philosophy, and, like Piccolomini, very polymathic and polygraphic. He had a year earlier published a Discourse (which I have not) on the Philosophical Principles of poetical kinds, and had very much earlier still, in 1553, commented the Epistola ad Pisones. His son Pietro was an affectionate and attentive disciple of Tasso’s in his last days at Rome.

151. I have not found much about Zinano near to hand, nor have I thought it worth while to go far afield in search of him. Tiraboschi (vii., 1716, 1900) names him as a poet-miscellanist in almost every kind. My copy, of 42 duodecimo pages, has been torn out of what was its cover, and may have been its company.

152. His Explanationes de Arte Poetica (Rome, 1587) are simply notes on Horace.

153. I have not yet been able to see L. Gambara, De Perfecta Poeseos Ratione (Rome, 1576), and I gather that Mr Spingarn was in the same case, as he refers not to the book, but to Baillet. According to that invaluable person (iii. 70), Gambara must have been an early champion of the uncompromisingly religious view of Poetry which appears in several French seventeenth-century writers, and in our own Dennis. The poet is not even to introduce a heathen divinity.

154. Venice, 1592-93.

155. Padua, 1600.

156. Cf. Butcher, op. cit., p. 297 and note.

109

CHAPTER IV.

THE CRITICISM OF THE PLÉIADE.

THE ‘RHETORICS’ OF THE TRANSITION—SIBILET—DU BELLAY—THE ‘DÉFENSE ET ILLUSTRATION DE LA LANGUE FRANÇAISE’—ITS POSITIVE GOSPEL AND THE VALUE THEREOF—THE ‘QUINTIL HORATIEN’—PELLETIER’S ‘ART POÉTIQUE’—RONSARD: HIS GENERAL IMPORTANCE—THE ‘ABRÉGÉ DE L’ART POÉTIQUE’—THE ‘PREFACES TO THE FRANCIADE’—HIS CRITICAL GOSPEL—SOME MINORS—PIERRE DE LAUDUN—VAUQUELIN DE LA FRESNAYE—ANALYSIS OF HIS ‘ART POÉTIQUE’—THE FIRST BOOK—THE SECOND—THE THIRD—HIS EXPOSITION OF ‘PLÉIADE’ CRITICISM—OUTLIERS: TORY, FAUCHET, ETC.—PASQUIER: THE ‘RECHERCHES’—HIS KNOWLEDGE OF OLDER FRENCH LITERATURE, AND CRITICISM OF CONTEMPORARY FRENCH POETRY—MONTAIGNE: HIS REFERENCES TO LITERATURE—THE ESSAY ‘ON BOOKS.’

There is, perhaps, no more remarkable proof of the extraordinarily germinal character of Italian literature than the influence which it exercised on France in the department with which we here deal. The Rhetorics of the Transition. It is needless to say that the subsequent story of French literature has shown how deep and wide is the critical vein in the French literary spirit. But up to the middle of the sixteenth century this vein was almost absolutely irrepertum—whether sic melius situm or not. A few Arts of Poetry and Rhetoric had indeed been introduced across the Channel long before we had any on this side, as we should expect in a language so much more advanced than English, and as we have partly seen in the preceding volume. The Art de dittier of Eustache Deschamps, at the end of the fourteenth century, had been followed[157] throughout 110the fifteenth by others, some of them bearing the not uninteresting or unimportant title of “Seconde Rhétorique,” as distinguishing Poetics from the Art of Oratory. The chief of these,[158] almost exactly a century later than the treatise of Deschamps, used to be assigned to Henri de Croy, and is now (very likely with no more reason) handed over to Molinet. But they were almost entirely, if not entirely, occupied with the intricacies of the “forms” of ballade, &c., and included no criticism properly so called.

The spirit and substance of these treatises seems to have been caught up and embodied, about the year 1500, in another Rhetoric,[159] which became very popular, and was known by such titles as the “Flower” or “Garden of Rhetoric,” but the author of which is only known by one of those agreeably conceited noms de guerre so frequent at the time, as “‘l’Infortunaté’” Its matter appeared, without much alteration or real extension, in the works of Pierre Fabri[160] and Gratien du Pont (1539),[161] and the 111actual birth of French criticism proper is postponed, by most if not all historians, till the fifth decade of the century, when Pelletier translated the Ars Poetica of Horace in 1545, while Sibilet wrote an original Art Poétique three years later, and just before Du Bellay’s epoch-making Défense.

There is little possibility of difference of opinion as to the striking critical moment presented to us by the juxtaposition, Sibilet. with but a single twelvemonth between, of Sibilet and Du Bellay. The importance of this movement is increased, not lessened, by the fact that Sibilet himself is by no means such a copyist of Gratien du Pont as Du Pont is of Fabri, and Fabri of the unknown “Unfortunate,” and the “Unfortunate” of all his predecessors to Deschamps. He does repeat the lessons of the Rhetorics as to verse and rhyme, and so forth. He has no doubt about the excellence of that “equivocal” rhyme to which France yet clings, though it has always been unpleasing to an English ear. And (though with an indication that they are passing out of fashion) he admits the most labyrinthine intricacies of the ballade and its group.[162]

But he is far indeed from stopping here. He was (and small blame to him) a great admirer of Marot, and he had already learnt to distrust that outrageous “aureation” of French with Greek and Latin words which the rhétoriqueurs had begun, which the intermediate school of Scève and Heroet were continuing,[163] and which the Pléiade, though with an atoning touch 112of elegance and indeed of poetry, was to maintain and increase, in the very act of breaking with other rhétoriqueur traditions. He delights in Marot’s own epigrams, and in the sonnets of Mellin de Saint-Gelais; and he is said to have anticipated Ronsard in the adoption of the term “ode” in French, though his odes are not in the least Pindaric (as for the matter of that Ronsard’s are not). The epistle and the elegy give fresh intimation of his independent following of the classics, and he pays particular attention to the eclogue, dwells on the importance of the “version” (translation from Greek or Latin into French verse), and in the opening of his book is not very far from that half-Platonic, half anti-Platonic, deification of Poetry which is the catch-cry of the true Renaissance critic everywhere. There is not very much real, and probably still less intentional, innovation or revolt in Sibilet; and it is precisely this that makes him so valuable. Fabri and Gratien du Pont are merely of the old: in no important way do the form and pressure of the coming time set their mark on them. Du Bellay is wholly of the new: he is its champion and crusader, full of scorn for the old. Sibilet, between them, shows, uncontentiously, the amount of leaning towards sometimes revised or exotic novelty, and away from immediate and domestic antiquity, which influenced the generation.

The position of the Défense et Illustration de la Langue Française may be said to be in the main assured and uncontested, nor do I think it necessary to make such a curious dictum as that it is “not in any true sense a work of literary criticism at all” the subject of much counter-argument. Du Bellay. In that case most undoubtedly the De Vulgari Eloquio, of which it has been not much less strangely held to be little more than a version adapted to the latitude of Paris, is not such a work either. I think it very likely that Du Bellay knew the De Vulgari, which Trissino had long before published in Italian; but both the circumstances and the purpose of the two books 113seem to me as entirely different as their position in literary criticism seems to me absolutely secure.

Whether this be so or not, Du Bellay’s circumstances are perfectly well known, and his purpose is sun-clear, alike before him and before his readers. The Défense et Illustration de la Langue Française. He is justifying the vulgar tongue,[164] but he is justifying it as Ascham and his friends were doing in England; with the proviso that it shall be reformed upon, strengthened by, and altogether put to school to, the classical languages in the first place, with in the second (and here Ascham would not have agreed) Italian and even Spanish. His dealing is no doubt titularly and ostensibly directed to the language; but his anxieties are wholly concentrated on the language as the organ of literature—and specially of poetry. That he made a mistake in turning his back, with the scorn he shows, on the older language itself, and even on the verse-forms which had so long occupied it, is perfectly true. This is the besetting sin of the Renaissance—its special form of that general sin which, as we said at the outset, doth so easily beset every age. But his scheme for the improvement is far more original; and, except in so far as it may have been faintly suggested by a passage of Quintilian,[165] had not, so far as I know, been anticipated by any one in ancient or modern times. Unlike Sibilet, and unlike preceding writers generally, he did not believe so very much in translation—seeing justly that by it you get the matter, but nothing, or at least not much, more.[166] He did not believe in the mere “imitation” of the ancients either. I cannot but think that M. Brunetière[167] has been 114rather unjust in upbraiding Du Bellay with the use of this word. He does use it: but he explains it. He wishes the ancients to be imitated in their processes, not merely in their results. His is no Ciceronianism; no “Bembism”; none of that frank advice to “convey” which Vida had given before him, and to which, unluckily, his master Ronsard condescended later. “How,” he asks, “did Greek and Latin become such great literary languages?” Were they always so? Not at all. It was due to culture, to care, to (in the case of Latin at least) ingenious grafting of fresh branches from Greek. So is French to graft from Greek, from Latin, from Italian, from Spanish even—so is the essence of the classics and the other tongues to be converted into the blood and nourishment of French.[168]

Is this “not in any pure sense literary criticism at all”? Is this “young” and “pedantic” and “too much praised” by (of Its positive gospel and the value thereof. all Sauls among the prophets!) Désiré Nisard? I have a great respect for Mr Spingarn’s erudition; I have a greater for M. Brunetière’s masterly insight and grasp in criticism; but here I throw down the glove to both. That Du Bellay was absolutely wrong in his scorn for ballade and rondeau and other “épiceries” I am sure; that his master was right in looking at least as much to the old French lexicon as to new constructions or adoptions I am sure. But Du Bellay (half or all unawares, as is the wont of finders and founders) has seized a secret of criticism which is of the most precious, and which—with all politeness be it spoken—I venture to think that M. Brunetière himself rather acknowledges and trembles at, than really ignores. This free trade in language, in forms, in processes,—this resolute determination to convert all the treasures of antiquity and modernity alike into “food” for the literary organism, “blood” for the literary veins, marrow for the literary bones,—is no small thing. It 115may not be the absolute and sole secret of literary greatness. But we can almost see that Greek, the most perfectly literary of all languages for a time, withered and dwindled because it did not pursue this course; that Latin followed it on too small a scale; above all, that English owes great part of its strength, and life, and splendid flourishing of centuries, to it. Du Bellay preached, perhaps more or less unconsciously, what Shakespeare practised—whether consciously or unconsciously we need neither know nor care, any more than in all probability he knew or cared himself.

No doubt all languages and all literatures have not the digestive strength required to swallow poison and food, bread and stones, almost indiscriminately, assimilating all the good, and dismissing most if not all of the evil. There are not, and never have been in England, wanting people, from the towering head of Swift down to quite creeping things of our own time, who have been distressed by “mob” and by “bamboozle,” by “velleity” and by “meticulous.” No doubt in France the objection has been still greater, and perhaps better founded on reason. But these propositions will not affect, in the slightest degree, the other proposition that Du Bellay, in the Défense, stumbled upon, and perhaps even half-consciously realised, that view of literature, and of language as the instrument of literature, which will have the whole to be mainly un grand peut-être—a vast and endless series of explorations in unknown seas, rather than a mathematical or chemical process of compounding definite formulas and prescriptions, so as to reach results antecedently certain. Very far would it have been from Nisard, who was no doubt bribed by the militant classicism of the Pléiade, to have given his praise had he thought this: I am even prepared to admit that Du Bellay himself would probably not have thanked me for the compliment of my theory. But hatred is often more sagacious than friendship. Malherbe and those about Malherbe knew perfectly well what the real spirit of the Pléiade was. And so does M. Brunetière, who has a scent as keen as that of Malherbe and those about Malherbe, and is very much better read, very much more scientifically equipped, 116and quite infinitely better provided with intellectual and critical gift.[169]

It was unlikely, or rather impossible, that so revolutionary a challenge should lack its answer, which duly appeared a year later under the odd title of Le Quintil Horatien.[170] The Quintil Horatien. This used to be attributed to Charles Fontaine, a poet of parts; but it seems that he repudiated it, and it is now handed over to a pedagogue of the name of Aneau. It is a dogged little book, which treats the Défense very much as if it were an impertinent school exercise, and goes through it with the lead pencil in a fashion at once laborious, ineffectual, and suggestive of a vain desire to substitute the birch rod. The author, whoever he was, might have found plenty of things to say against Du Bellay, and he is on fairly solid ground when he indignantly protests that William of Lorris, Chartier, Villon, and others were not the artless clowns, or positive sinners, that this petulant-sparkling star of the Pléiade had looked awry upon. But even here his own ignorance of the still better things before the Rose disabled him: and it is by no means certain that he would have had the wit to appreciate them if he had known them. He thinks the sonnet too “easy,” poor man! condemns the elegy on the absurd ground that it saddens the reader; and (committing the same fault in defence which more modern critics have committed in attack) bases his main, if not his whole, praise of Ballade and Chant Royal, 117Rondeau and Rondel, on their mere difficulty. But his most unfortunate, if not his most absurd, error was the line which, in common with most respectable persons, both then and since, he takes up against the verbum inusitatum, as shown in the new poetic diction of the Pléiade. This was doubly unlucky: first, because the fifteenth-century poets whom he champions had themselves “aureated” the language in or out of all conscience already; and secondly, because this kind of criticism, whether it be applied to Montaigne or Dryden, to Carlyle or Browning, is always a dangerous delusion. Very classical critics have pecked and mocked at the author of the Quintil Horatien because he black-marks not merely words useful or beautiful, like sinueux, oblivieux, rasséréner, but even such now sterling coin as liquide and patrie. It would be well if they, or those like them, would think twice before condemning, as neologisms, terms which may not impossibly seem as much matter of course to the twenty-fourth century as patrie does to the twentieth. But the author of the Quintil is really of that breed of carping critics which carps itself out of all common-sense. He makes ponderous fun of the initial signature I. D. B. A. (“J. du Bellay Angevin”); objects to the statement that “nature gave us tongues to speak,” because Aristotle, Galen, and Petrus Hispanus agree that palate, throat, lips, and teeth are also necessary to the process; to the use of voix instead of son, where animals are not concerned. The sea would have no voice for him—and doubtless had none.

From such mere “denigration” (the censor permits himself this word as a stone to throw at Du Bellay) no good thing Pelletier’s Art Poétique. could come: and besides, for some generation or more, the brother stars were to fight in their courses for Pléiade criticism as well as for Pléiade poetry. The second Ars Poetica of the French Renaissance—the first in any full modern sense—appeared in 1555 from the hand of Jacques Pelletier, himself a spelling reformer, a professor, and, what is more, a mathematician; but a man of versatile ability and much eagerness to welcome any new good thing, with no small power of starting such things. He was a pleasant poet, full of Pléiade manner before the Pléiade had been 118formed; nor can even his absurd spelling[171] quite hide the beauty of such things as

“Alors que la vermeille Aurore.”

And when, at the age of nearly forty, he wrote his Poetic, nobody could charge him with being a mere theorist. He went heart and soul for the Pléiade ideas, and like Du Bellay and the rest, as indeed was unavoidable, busied himself first of all with the reform of the language. He recommends the formation of a regular poetic diction, and goes so far (I do not say that it is too far) as to approve of retaining double forms, one fully “frenchified,” one simply Latin with a French termination (e.g., repousse and repulse), the first for prosaic, the second for poetic use. The famous Pléiade stumbling-blocks, the compound epithet and the inverted order of words, are no stumbling-blocks for him—he takes them triumphantly in the stride of his revolutionary ardour: and he joins Ronsard also in the safer if not more popular recommendation of archaism, and of adoption of didactic forms at pleasure. No doubt he is not always wise: though the Classical school which followed had lost the right to reproach him with abusing the principle of suiting the sound to the sense. But still there is a great wisdom in him. Himself an excellent rhymer, he has some of the qualms about rhyme which were so frequent in the sixteenth century; but he is sound on the point (in French not admitting of any serious contest) that without rhyme poetry becomes prose, and he is more than lukewarm as to classical metres. It is sad but not surprising that he joins Du Bellay in condemning the delightful if not all-sufficing metrical kinds which had produced such charming things from Lescurel to Villon; and he duly recommends comedy, tragedy, and epic in their place. As he had himself translated the Epistle to the Pisos eleven years earlier, it is not wonderful that he sticks very close to it. Whether, as has been said by some, he does not know Aristotle, may not be quite certain; but it is certain that Aristotelian doctrines make no figure in him: it will be remembered that 119they had not made much even in Italy at this time. In fact, it seems reasonable to doubt whether, despite their adoration of Greek, the Pléiade writers ever drew much direct inspiration from the Poetics, though, in Italian translations and commentaries at least, it must have influenced them to some extent.

The most interesting figure of Pléiade criticism, however, is, as it should be, Ronsard[172] himself. Ronsard: his general importance. The greatness of this really great poet must be injuriously affected, but ought not to be obscured to critical judgment, both by the fact (for which he is to blame) that he tried too many things and wrote too much; and by the other fact (for which he is blameless) that he attempted a new theory and practice of poetry, not, like his younger and more fortunate contemporary Spenser, at the beginning of a great poetic wave in his own country, but at a time when that country’s energies were steadily settling towards prose. Yet he was nothing if not critical. The actual amount of critical expression that he has left us is not large: it is a pity that he did not devote to it some of the time which he might well have spared from his too copious, and sometimes too undistinguished, versemanship. He is, like Dryden (whom he resembles in not a few ways so much that I should be surprised if the parallel has not struck others), somewhat careless of outward consistency in his critical utterances—a carelessness indicative in each case of real critical sincerity, of the fact that the two poets were honestly seeking the way, and had the sense not to persevere in blind alleys when they found them blind. Above all, like the whole of his school, he is distinguished by a critical note, which must be dwelt on in the Interchapter succeeding this book, but which may well be indicated here—the note that they are much more bent on the production of new literature than on the study of old.

But, for all this, he is a remarkable critic, and in his critical 120aperçus we can ourselves perceive germs, indications, suggestions, which might have resulted in the creation of a much larger body of actual criticism. Indeed these are (as M. Pellissier[173] and others have shown) actually responsible for much that is most characteristic, and for most of what is best, in the Classical school of the next century, which affected to despise him, as well as for other things which, if that school had followed them out, would have saved it from its most fatal mistakes and shortcomings.

The main critical loci in Ronsard have been duly pointed out by his editor, M. Prosper Blanchemain. The Abrégé de l’Art Poétique. They are the formal Abrégé de l’Art Poétique of 1565; the prefatory matter to his not too well-starred epic, the Franciade, ten years later and onwards; and the remarkable Caprice au Seigneur Simon Nicolas—a poem written late, and not, it seems, published save posthumously. The “Abridgement”[174] answers to its name, for it only fills just twenty Elzevirian pages. It begins in a manner which shows (as so many other things do in Ronsard) the gaps which separated him from, as well as the ties which united him to, the usual thought of the Renaissance, and still more that of the seventeenth century. Although there are of course exceptions, the general drift of Italian criticism had been that poetry, like any other art or science, is a thing teachable and learnable. On no other ground could the “archæolatry,” which we have found almost universal, be maintained for a moment. Now Ronsard, though he dwells again and again on the necessity of study, begins with an apology for writing an Art of Poetry at all. He has had, he says modestly, some experience and practice, and he will do his best to give his correspondent[175] the benefit thereof. But poesy is plus mental que traditif, which we may translate “more native to the mind than communicable to it.” He accordingly converts (with an agreeable twist) the stock invocation to the Muses into a real prayer for this mental endowment, and with equal ingenuity freshens up the stale clichés about the divinity 121of Ancient poets, and about the Muses refusing to lodge save in a virtuous and pious mind. Therefore, too, study of these former favourites of poetry is requisite. But from these generalities he plunges straight into extremely minute details. Greek, Latin, and French—it is probable that he does not mention Italian because his correspondent, Delbène, was of Italian extraction—are to be carefully studied as languages. The rules of French prosody—among which is here for the first time authoritatively included the alternation of masculine and feminine rhymes—are to be carefully observed, and e is to be always elided before a vowel. It is perhaps worth noting that Ronsard uses “cæsura” for “elision,” a catachresis in which he had followers, and which even affected Dryden. Greek and Roman proper names are, where possible, to be frenchified in termination. “The old words of our romances” (this is of the first importance) are not to be ejected, but to be chosen with care and prudence. Terms of art and technical similes are to be sought out with extreme diligence, so as to supply life and nerve to the book. Dialect-words may be used at need; the example of the Greeks being invoked here—perhaps a little rashly. Invention, says Ronsard, is the working of the Imagination; but he seems still inclined to the old limitation of this word to the retailing of images, and reprobates more strongly than is perhaps necessary or desirable ces inventions fantastiques et mélancholiques qui ne se rapportent non plus l’une à l’autre que les songes entrecoupés des frénétiques. There is to be first of all (note the Frenchman) Order and Disposition in poetical devices.

This order and this disposition are to be secured by a happy nature in the first place, and by a careful study of good models in the second. Among these good models, “those who have illustrated our language in the last fifteen years” (i.e., since the Défense) are to be counted in; and (this was added later) foreign modern languages are also to be carefully studied for the enriching of the mother tongue. “Elocution” is nothing else than “a propriety and splendour of words well chosen, and ornamented with grave and short sentences, which make verses shine, like as do precious stones, well mounted, the fingers of 122some great seignior.”[176] The vocabulary must be copious and composed of well-sifted words, with plentiful description and comparison, moulded specially on Homer. The common form of “great” poem-making follows, with reference to Aristotle as well as Horace, with caution against trite and otiose epithets, against epithet-strings à l’Italienne, but with a strong praise of the mot propre. Rhyme is treated rather briefly; and then Ronsard drops to minutiæ of e's and h's, discusses Alexandrines (which, in a later edition, he says he should have employed in the Franciade but for powerful command) and “common” (decasyllabic) verse, and others, passes to some grammatical and orthographical cautions, and ends with the promise, unluckily never fulfilled, of a longer Poetic some day.

It may have been in part payment of this promise that he wrote the Prefatory matter to the Franciade.[177] The Prefaces to the Franciade. This, which, as it stands in the modern editions, is triform, consists of a short Preface (or Au Lecteur) in prose, from the master’s own hand, to the original edition; of a verse exordium, or rather Introduction, separate from the poem proper; and, between the two, of a second Preface or Treatise on Heroic Poetry of some length, which we have, not as it left the author’s pen, but arranged and revised (it is said under his direction) by Claude Binet. The critical interest of the verse Proem lies in the enthusiastic glorification of Homer and Virgil (who have shown the whole secret of epic-writing, and whose work the author bids his own “adore on its knees”), and in a spirited reissue of the cardinal doctrine of the Pléiade that French is a fertile soil, all overgrown and untilled, which must be brought under cultivation by the unsparing labour of poets and scholars.

The first Preface begins with the time-honoured comparison, or contrast, between History and Poetry, as dealing, the one with verity, the other with verisimilitude. Hence Ronsard strikes off to set Homer and Virgil far above all others, and to 123fix a stigma on Ariosto as presenting a body handsome enough in members, but so counterfeit and monstrous as a whole that it is like an unwholesome dream. He has evidently on his mind the objections, perhaps of the ancients, perhaps of some Italians, to the combination of historical poetry, and endeavours to meet the objection that he comes nearer to actual history “than Virgilian art permits” by the rather perilous excuse that Virgil only lived under a second emperor, while he himself lives under the successor of a long line of kings, and that Charles our Lord and King insisted on no invidious preference being shown to some of his ancestors over the others. Indeed Ronsard is too typical a Frenchman for a sense of humour to be exactly his strong point.

He then proceeds to name, as his example, rather “the naïve facility of Homer than the curious diligence of Virgil”: though he ventures to reprehend some excess of improbability in the scheme and details of the Iliad, and ends with some particulars of apology and explanation. The most curious of these are a passage giving reasons (by no means in strict accordance with the sentence referred to above) for rejecting the Alexandrine in favour of the decasyllable, and a pathetic appeal to the reader not to read his poem like an official document,[178] but to accommodate his voice to its passion, and especially to raise that voice whenever he comes to a mark of exclamation.

The second, later, longer, and, as we have said, not quite authentic, Preface, addressed to the Lecteur Aprentif, is a discourse on the Heroic Poem in general; and as such is responsible for the specimens of the kind with which the next century was troubled in France, if not for those from the Henriade downwards, which serve as even less cheerful ornaments to the French literature of the eighteenth. We have seen already how carefulness and trouble about this thing had been gathering and growing in Italy, and how it was, in Ronsard’s own days, causing the storm about the Gerusalemme. The “Maronolatry” which France shared with Italy led to it directly; and even the championship 124of Homer (as in Ronsard’s own case)—the attempt to establish two kings of the Epic Brentford—was certain to conduce to it. Ronsard himself, however, does not at first attempt the general question; indeed it is hardly possible to draw attention too often to the far greater abstinence from general and deductive consideration which at this time characterises the French critics, as compared with the Italians. He begins with a fresh attack (not quite in the best faith, if his own later remarks be pressed, as perhaps they need not be) on the Alexandrine; and, by a deflection more natural in the original than it appears in a summary, goes off to a panegyric of periphrasis, which again was only too docilely received by his successors of all schools for the next two centuries in France. His examples are taken from Virgil—indeed the earlier part of this Preface, at any rate, is as enthusiastically Virgilian as Scaliger himself could desire. Then he puts stress once more on the significant epithet, lays down obiter the delightfully arbitrary dictum that, as the unity of drama is the revolution of a day, so the unity of at least a war-epic is the revolution of a year, dwells largely on his favourite distinction between the poet and the versifier, which he justifies (not too well) by insisting on artful variations of the narrative by speeches, dreams, prophecies, pictures,[179] auguries, fantastic visions, and appearances of gods and demons. All this time we have heard nothing of Homer, and indeed have read nearly half a score pages before his name occurs as furnishing Virgil with some of his facts and personages, just as he had drawn his own from older stories, “comme nous faisons des contes de Lancelot, de Tristan, de Gauvain, et d’Artus,” a passage to be noted. The dozen or so which remain are oddly occupied by a sort of jumble of notes and hints to the epic poet, reminding one of that valuable paper of advice which Sir John Hawkins sent to Captain Amyas Leigh, on “all points from the mounting of ordnance to the use of vitriol and limmons against the scurvy.” He must describe splendid palaces and grounds, trace heroes and heroines to gods and nymphs, dress them handsomely, wound them in 125the right places,[180] not invent too much, allow himself enjambement and hiatus, use plentiful comparisons and terms of art, do things handsomely in general, boil his very kettles with a Homeric afflatus,[180] be thoroughly careful about study, but, above all, attend to diction, as to which the cautions and licences of the Abrégé are repeated in fuller form, with a special injunction not to Ciceronianise idly, but to faire un lexicon des vieils mots d’Artus, de Lancelot, et de Gauvain.

Ronsard will necessarily give us text for remark on the criticism of the Pléiade in the Interchapter following this Book. His critical gospel. But we must say a little of his critical attitude here. That it is of more interest than positive importance cannot easily be denied. Not only for our purpose, but for its own, it is injured by the very sincerity, practicalness, and common-sense of the writer’s purpose and view. He clearly does not regard the past of French literature with quite such a petulant contempt as that of Pelletier and Du Bellay. But he is even more steadily and thoroughly convinced that something better can, should, and shall be done: and it is on the doing of this, by himself and others, that all his thoughts are fixed. He does not give himself the time—he does not, it is evident, think it in the least worth while—to take a critical survey of the past in any detail, or with any general grouping. It is enough for him that Homer and Virgil are of the greatest, and that their work is also of the greatest; and he wishes Frenchmen to go and do likewise. He almost, if not altogether, accepts the end as a datum; and is only troubled about the means. In regard to some of these means his doctrine, though somewhat ondoyant and even inconsistent, is surprisingly sound and original. If part of it was accepted with advantage by his countrymen in the centuries which followed, other parts were discarded and neglected, with an almost incalculably disastrous result. That “lexicon of the old words of Lancelot and Artus” would have saved French from the drab smug insignificance of its eighteenth-century 126garb; those cautions about enjambement and the like might almost have done for France what Spenser and Shakespeare did for England.

But this comparative independence in some points was—probably from the want of that real historical horizontality of view which, of all the sixteenth-century critics, Cinthio, Castelvetro, and Patrizzi alone seem in various degrees to have attained—accompanied by a singular servility and conventionality in others. “Why, O Prince of Poets!” one feels inclined to say, “with all reverence to your grey and laurelled head—why should we trouble ourselves about peintures insérées contre le dos d’une muraille, et des harnois, et principalement des boucliers because one very great poet found them useful to produce historical effects nearly three thousand years ago, and another much lesser poet chose to imitate him slavishly some thousand years later? Why should we do it, even supposing the two poets to be on a level? Very likely Homer’s warriors had painted or graven bucklers. We have not. Arthur’s knights had not—at least the paintings (assuming them to be armorial) were quite different. Why should we have the ‘monstrous language of horses wounded to death’? Why this childish limitation in imitation? Handsome dresses are admirable things: but why must we be limited to lion-skins and panther-skins and bearskins for the material? If we have got to make a cauldron boil, let it double double, boil and bubble by all means: but suppose we don’t want to boil it?” To all this we not only get no answer from Ronsard; but in his critical writing (not, as we have said, extensive nor always outwardly consistent, but thoroughly uniform in spirit) we find no trace of any such aporia ever having presented itself to his mind. They did these things and produced good effects: let us do them that we may produce good. It seems a “good old rule” enough: yet perhaps it is “a simple plan” also in more senses than one.

Good or bad, complete or incomplete, this criticism is the very soul of the Pléiade. Its playwrights, such as Grévin[181] 127and Jean de la Taille,[182] followed Italian practice in prefixing argumentative discussions to their plays—reflecting on the mediæval drama, comparing, in modest or buoyant spirit, their own work to that of the ancients, and the like. Some minors. A section of the school (as was almost unavoidable, despite the “No-Surrender” resistance which French as a language opposes to the proceeding) tried classical metres after the principles of Tolomei: and Jacques de la Taille, the brother of Jean, a poet and dramatist of fantastic but distinct ability, wrote a tractate[183] in defence of them. They made closer and closer approximations to the absolute Trinity of Unities: and though Du Bellay in his youthful fervour had committed himself to a not unwise antinomianism, they more and more showed themselves as the true ancestors of the neo-classic school, by framing and insisting on “rules.” The great men of letters who were more or less unattached, but well-willing irregulars of the school, such as Pasquier and Montaigne, bestow, in their different ways, increasing attention on literary criticism and literary history. And, just before and after the junction of the centuries, when the Pléiade proper had set, and its influence was about to wane before the narrow and arbitrary classicism of Malherbe on the one hand, and the rococo-picaresque of the Spanish school on the other, there appeared two formal Arts of Poetry, the one the complete and final code of Pléiade Poetic, the other a rather hybrid and nondescript product, chequering Ronsardism with a good deal of Italian matter.

This last,[184] the earlier to appear, in 1598, had for author Pierre de Laudun, sometimes spoken of, from a seignory of his, as de Laudun d’Aigaliers. Pierre de Laudun. It is in prose, and its author, who is roundly described by Herr Rücktaschel as a “copyist of the purest water,” diversifies his borrowings from Sibilet, Ronsard, and Pelletier on the one hand, from Scaliger 128and “Vituperani” on the other, with plentiful examples from his own work; for he had followed one greater man with a Franciade and ante-dated another with a Horace. I cannot enter any strong protest against the hard words (not confined to those already quoted) which his German critic bestows on him.[185] His real interest is purely that of symptom and tendency, in which respect he shows a rather odd but not uninstructive mixture. On one side he rejects the Ronsardising coinage of words and adoption of dialect forms, with other Pléiade traits. On another he shows himself recalcitrant to the coming classicastry by declaring that “we are not bound by their laws”—e.g., in regard to the number of acts. On a third we find him emphasising this attitude into an absolute refusal of the Unity of Time, against which he says almost all the obvious and sensible things, in a fashion to some extent redeeming what is on the whole the work of a not very intelligent bookmaker.

Vauquelin de la Fresnaye has not this sudden cry of the voice in the desert: but his Art Poétique is, as a whole, a book of infinitely greater interest and value than Laudun’s. Vauquelin was a gentleman and lawyer of Normandy, who, born at the château whence he took his name, near Falaise, fought, amused himself, loved the country and its sports, became President at Caen, and wrote verses of no small merit in various kinds. Vauquelin de la Fresnaye. His Art Poétique was more than thirty years on the stocks: and having had its keel laid in 1574, when the Pléiade, though a quarter of a century old, was still in full flourishing, did not get launched till 1605, when a new age had begun in more than chronological fashion. It is a composition of considerable bulk, consisting of three books, each running to rather under twelve hundred lines. Either of deliberation, or as a result of intermittent attention during the time in which it was a-preparing, Vauquelin arranged it (or failed to arrange it) in most admired disorder. The precisians of the next age would have been horrified at the promiscuous character of its observations; and some would have been grateful 129to its latest editor[186] if, in addition to, or instead of, part of the elaborate and very valuable apparatus criticus of various kinds which he has given, he had prefixed an argument. As it is, we must make one: for the book, if not one of our very greatest points de repère, is yet such a point.

After a prose address to the Reader, containing a rather touching reference to the flight of time and the change of public opinion since he had begun his work, to the cares of life, and the troubles of the realm, and the death of old friends—he begins with the proper invocation. Analysis of his Art Poétique. Immediately after he gives, as has been justly observed, a warning note by an elaborate simile-description of Poesy as an ordered garden, with beds and paths and hedges, wherein if any rude boy should trample on the beds, desert the paths, and break down the espaliers, the gardener would assuredly make injurious observations to him, and drive him out—the Gardener being further identified as no less a person than the Divinity. This comparison would of itself show that Vauquelin aims at no arrogant originality; but he is yet more explicit. His four guides are le fils de Nicomache (Aristotle, of course; but note how Ronsard’s fatal counsel of periphrasis has already sunk, never to be quite extracted, into the French mind!), the “harper of Calabria” (Horace), Vida, and Minturno.[187] But he hardly apologises for writing in French. Then, borrowing from Cleanthes, through Seneca, the old comparison of verse to “a trumpet which adds power to the voice,” he passes non sine Dis—with abundant indulgence in mythology—to the exaltation of Number and Harmony at large, and to theorising in the Imitation of Nature. He holds high the banner of the Ronsardian unification of Arts; and while 130insisting that even the ugly may be made interesting, if not beautiful, in the imitation of it, repeats the old cautions about inconsistent and too fantastic admixture of imagery. Among other followings of Ronsard we note the earnest advice to cultivate stately descriptions and abundant ornament. But he does not omit—though it must be allowed he does not observe it over strictly himself—the caution to keep the thread,

“Si tu fais un Sonnet, ou si tu fais une Ode.”

The praise of order and consistency gives place to remarks on diction which repeat the Ronsardist canons and cautions, and to a fashionable contempt (to be taken up later, as so much else was, by the thankless Neo-Classics) of Anagrams and Acrostics. The First Book. The usual twinning of Homer and Virgil is succeeded by reference to some other classics: and for a time Vauquelin seems to be confining himself (in so far as his expatiatory manner ever admits confinement) to the ouvrage héroique, whence he turns to other kinds, and the verse-forms suitable for them. He repeats Du Bellay’s curse on ballade and rondeau,[188] and passes like him to a special eulogy of the Sonnet, in which (as Du Bellay was not able to do) he is able now to produce a stately list of French practitioners. This part of the Book, a little after its middle, is full of literary history and allusion, the latter touching foreign languages and literatures as well as French. And the rest of it is occupied with a fresh and rather disorderly account of styles and kinds, with the verse and diction proper to each, ending up with a curious amplification of Quintilian’s story[189] about Apelles and Antigonus, the moral of which seems to be a sort of Medio tutissimus ibis

The Second Book also has its due invocations to the Muses and the King: and Vauquelin divagates, in his amiable way, for some hundred lines before he settles down to paraphrase Horace’s warning about the scriptor cyclicus, and to give, as examples of exordium, not merely a 131refashioning in Alexandrines of the opening of Ronsard’s Franciade, but a long extract from his own projected epic of the Israëlide. The Second. But as soon as he has done this (to the extent, it is true, of some fifty lines) he affects shame at quoting himself, and bids the poet swim in the Greek and Latin sea, especially in Virgil. In fact, Vauquelin is much more of a Virgil-worshipper than Ronsard, and almost as much as Vida, if not as Scaliger; and it is curious to see in his work that unconquerable, and as it were magnetic, repulsion from the greater poetry of Homer, and attraction towards the lesser verse of Virgil, which more and more shows itself, from the start of the Renaissance to the finish of the eighteenth century. Although he again and again diverges to the prose Epic (with the usual example of Heliodorus and the Æthiopica), to the artificial epic unity of a year (which he doubtless took, after Ronsard, from Minturno), and so forth, he as constantly returns to Virgil, describing him in one place plumply as “second to Homer in age, but first in rank.”

Then he reverts to his Horace, and, not forgetting a hint to the poet (one frequent with him) that he had better take French and Christian subjects such as the crusade of St Louis, he dilutes largely the famous clauses of his model on keeping the type of age and youth, &c. This leads him naturally to the subject of drama, on which he is, of course, severely Horatian; especially in regard to messengers and the avoidance of awkward things on the stage. He has the Pléiade drama, too, before him as he writes; extols the Chorus, and again does not forget his hints of Christian subjects. But in the sequel he leaves his ancient authorities, and their severer tastes, rather on one side, in order to dwell at great length on the accessories of the stage—music, mise-en-scène, &c., with a not uninteresting reference—like that of Sibilet (v. supra) earlier, and possibly due to it—to the moralities of nos vieux François, as well as a welcome to the Ballet and to his native Vaux-de-Vire. He indulges in a warm eulogy of French as a language passing all the vulgars of Europe, and of French poetry, and then handles Satire, a subject in which he was an expert, and which he had treated in a prose Discourse, joined to his own 132exercises in the kind. He connects it with the Provençal Sirvente, allows the coq-à-l'âne a sort of poor-relationship, and dwells on French lyric poets at some length, once more commending Latin models and (in a deflection, more logical than some of his, to the subject of iambic and other metre) noticing the recent attempts at a quantified prosody. On this subject he prudently declines to commit himself: posterity must decide. And the rest of the Book again busies itself with various styles and kinds, the measures proper to them, and the authors, modern as well as ancient, who have treated them best.

These lucubrations, however, disorderly as they may seem, contain numerous things of interest—a just remark on rhyme as practically the equivalent of stricter metrical arrangement; observations on the prose Lancelot, &c., showing that Vauquelin was not destitute of that knowledge of the older literature of his country which distinguished France and Frenchmen rather creditably in the Renaissance, and to which we shall presently return. Divers contemporary authors are also mentioned, Garnier being singled out for special (and well deserved) praise; and there is a pleasant reminiscence of the time when

Nous passions dans Poitiers l’Avril de notre vie,

and, instead of attending to the study of the law, followed the frolics of the Muses. The actual close of the Second Book is a neither undignified nor ill-felt wail over the sufferings of France in the religious wars, and an expression of confidence in the King’s powers of healing.

The Third.

The Third Book, after the usual decorative beginnings, returns to Drama, and takes up Comedy, with praise for Grévin and Belleau, and a long discussion of the nature and varieties of the kind, including Tragi-comedy, in which, naturally, the Bradamante of Garnier, the only considerable example, is taken for study. Next a turn, half abrupt, is made to Pastoral; and then Vauquelin returns to his favourite Satire and to other forms, taking his texts from Horace, Vida, and his own fancy, in a slightly bewildering 133manner, but to some extent carrying off the à propos de bottes of his argument by his serene indifference to it, and the total absence of any awkward apologies or attempts to join. By degrees he settles, or seems to be settling, to the general questions (What is the end of poetry? Instruction or Pleasure? and the like), but turns from them to a long catalogue of the poets of his time.

The foot-by-foot following of Horace, which is more noticeable than ever in the last three or four hundred lines—with the licence of going off at any tangent from Horatian texts which Vauquelin also permits himself—would account for any amount of the desultoriness which is only disguised (if, indeed, it can be said to be disguised) from the most careless, in Horace himself, by the brevity of his scale and the brilliancy of his phrase. But we do not, of course, go to Vauquelin for an orderly treatise; we go to him that he may tell us what an interesting and remarkable division of French men of letters knew of criticism and thought of literature.

His answer is not the less, but the more, valuable because of its apparent incoherence, this incoherence being itself a piece of evidence in the case. His exposition of Pléiade criticism. The Pléiade, as we have said more than once, was eagerly critical; but it had a strictly practical object, its criticism being entirely subsidiary and preliminary to the desire of creation. We meet here with nothing of the rather fatally “disinterested” investigation of the Italians. Even the ancients are studied less with a view to appreciating their beauties than with the desire to steal their thunder.

The precepts of Vauquelin’s four guides—of Horace first and most of all, of Aristotle occasionally, of Vida pretty often, and of Minturno nonnunquam, are all adjusted to this end. Incidentally, of course, Vauquelin shows us some general critical views—the canonisation of Virgil, the adherence to the classical Senecan drama, the discouragement of mediæval forms, if not entirely of mediæval subjects and language. But, directly, he is the technical instructor, not the theoretical critic. His technique, with some slight alterations, is almost purely that of Ronsard, and displays the same admixture of the classical tendency 134which the seventeenth century took up and hardened, with a quasi-romantic breadth and licence which that century rejected. It is easy to say, and not very difficult to see, that it might—that it actually did—result in a practice too promiscuous at worst, at best a little too eclectic—that French was not ready in point of time, and perhaps not quite suited in point of temperament, for the bridle to be flung too freely on the neck of Pegasus; and that Vauquelin is almost directly responsible for inciting the growth of the weeds at which his successor Boileau slashed with such a desperate hook sixty years later. It is even possible to say, on the other side, that Du Bellay’s questioning of rules altogether was, from the Romantic point of view, sounder than Vauquelin’s provision of what may be called conditional licences. We ought, however, to look at the Art Poétique rather in the light of what had gone before its long-delayed appearance than of what followed—at the production of 1559-1600, not at that of 1600-1660. It is in effect an a posteriori rationalising and methodising of Pléiade Poetry. This poetry is even now not much known in England, and its defects—inequality, heaviness at times, pedantry, a strange and almost irritating inability to get the wings quite free save at rare moments—are undeniable. But there is something, in the Art itself, of the better qualities of its subjects: and to those who give themselves the trouble to make their acquaintance, these subjects have a strange and a peculiar charm, in their mixture of gravity and grace, of love and lore, of paganism and piety, yea, of Classic and Romantic themselves. The hedone of the Pléiade is alethes as well as oikeia, and in this handbook of the school Vauquelin has revealed at least some of its secrets. Those who can do this are no contemptible, and no common, critics.

But though Vauquelin thus sums up, in spirit as in time, the formal criticism of the Pléiade, we have not yet quite done with this. Outliers: Tory, Fauchet, &c. It has been, throughout, the practice of this book to take into consideration not only such formal expressions, but also those of men who, outside formal rhetoric or deliberate criticism, represent the literary taste of their time. The latter part of the French sixteenth century is 135not poor in such. On the contrary, the interest in literature of this kind which it displays perhaps exceeds that shown in any country of Europe. Even Italy, despite its immensely greater volume of formal literary discussion and academic literary history, falls short in a certain intelligent independence of consideration. We might draw on works of many kinds, from the eccentric and mainly grammatical or typographical but extremely interesting Champfleury of Geoffroy Tory (which, as is well known, contains the original of Rabelais’ Limousin scholar) as early as 1529; we might without too great straining bring in Master Francis himself, and we cannot justly neglect the name of Claude Fauchet, who almost deserves that of Premier historian of literature in Europe. But, obeying that system of representative treatment, especially in the outlying departments, of the subject, the necessity of which grows more urgent at every chapter and almost every page of this book, we may chiefly deal with two writers, the one almost as much of an antiquary and historian as Fauchet, but of greater literary faculty and a pleasanter style; the other one of the great names of the world’s letters, and, in his own fitful fashion, referring to literature itself frequently and importantly enough. To those who know anything of the time this last sentence will have already named, without naming, Etienne Pasquier and Michel de Montaigne.

The chapters of Pasquier’s[190] Recherches de la France, in which he deals with French literature, are perhaps the most interesting of the whole. Pasquier: The Recherches. He had himself been an ardent disciple of the Pléiade, and a pleasant poet, in his youth; and in his maturer years he applied to the history of literature the same untiring research and sound good sense which made him the first historical inquirer, as distinguished from mere chroniclers, in France. It is not entirely unimportant that, in his preliminary remarks on the subject, he announces his intention of devoting his seventh book to French 136Poetry and his eighth to French language—a pointed if unintentional expression of the predominance of poetry in literature even as late as the end of the sixteenth century. His first observations are directed to the difference between French and other modern languages on the one hand, and ancient poetry on the other, in the matter of rhyme, which he would derive (not without at least as much justification of probability and history as other theorists can allege) from the rhythmical parallelisms of prose speech, at first accidentally sweetened by homœoteleuton, and then deliberately by rhyme itself. He is well aware that the language of the Franks must have been German; and his theory of French as composed of three languages, Walloon (by which he probably means Gallic or Celtic), Latin, and Frankish, will be more obnoxious to philological pedants than to philosophical philologists. He knows the monorhymed chansons such as Berte aux grans Piés, but is disposed to put them unnecessarily late—nay, he seems to think that there was little before the thirteenth century and Philip Augustus. Yet he is not unaware of the much greater antiquity of the decasyllable as compared with the Alexandrine.

Indeed Pasquier has a not inconsiderable knowledge of mediæval poetry—a knowledge at any rate extending far beyond that of the Pléiade generally, who were as a rule content to recognise, with a certain toleration, the Roman de la Rose. His knowledge of older French literature, He knows and praises Helinand, the authors of the great Alixandre, Thibaut de Champagne, Chrestien de Troyes, Raoul de Houdenc—not merely, it would seem, from Fauchet’s book, but in themselves; and he quotes Ogier le Danois, Athis et Prophilias, Cléomadès, &c. Like a sensible man, he has that indispensable chapter on Provençal literature which some would cast out of French literary history, thereby making it unintelligible. And then he passes to the prose Arthurian romances, and to the formal poetry of the fourteenth century, of which he speaks without any of the exaggerated and slightly unintelligent—certainly intolerant—contempt of Du Bellay and Vauquelin. “Servitude, que je ne die gêne d’esprit, admirable,” “ces mignardises” are his mild censures of them, 137and he gives particular attention to Froissart and Alain Chartier, with mention of Villon and others, and a very high eulogium of Pathelin. He does not, he says, know the author (nor do we), but he will dare to say that this farce, as a whole and in parts, fait contrecarre to the comedies of both Greeks and Romans. He is fairly copious on the men of letters of the first half of the century, and then begins a new chapter with the picturesque and often-quoted phrase about the “great fleet of poets” that the reign of Henri II. brought forth, and their new style of poetry.

He gives to Maurice Scève the honour of captaining the leading ship of this fleet; and then follow all the well-known names (and some not so well known) of the school proper, the catalogue being capped by some extremely interesting and valuable critical-anecdotic remarks on the greater writers, especially Ronsard himself. and criticism of contemporary French poetry. One could hardly be more just on this difficult[191] poet than is Pasquier, who allows him not merely grandeur but sweetness to almost any extent, “quand il a voulu doux couler”; calls him grand poète entre poètes, but admits that he was “très mauvais censeur et aristarque de ses livres.” Then he partly returns upon his steps in another chapter, where he approaches French poetry from a different side, considering especially its verse-structure, with examples from Marot downwards, and dwelling on the alternation of masculine and feminine rhymes which Ronsard had sanctioned. On this matter the historical equity of Pasquier is especially noticeable, as opposed to the somewhat excessive correctness (according to pedagogic ideas of the correct) shown by most Frenchmen. He declines to take a side between “this new diligence and the old nonchalance.” And he makes the very acute observation that Marot only allowed himself this nonchalance in verse which was not to be sung—a proof, as he remarks, that though Master Clement might not be Ronsard’s equal in learning, he had a facilité d’esprit admirable. In yet another passage he compares French with Italian poetry, and, emboldened by this, with Latin itself; taking the patriotic side with equal courage and ingenuity, and ending with the 138citation of some of his own Latin verses on Ronsard, and with the sigh, “De toute cette grande compagnie qui mit la main à la plume sous Henri II. il restait quatre, Théodore de Bèze, Ponthus de Thyard, Louis le Caron, et moi.” Then, after a short appendix-chapter on classical metres in French (which he would like to approve, but seems in two minds about), he passes to language, on his treatment of which we cannot dwell. But he never allows himself to stray far from literature, and makes a pretext for returning at some length to his beloved Pathelin.

It may be observed that Pasquier, though interested in letters to an extreme degree, enjoys more than he judges—not perhaps the worst defect of the critic.

The agile and penetrating intelligence of Montaigne could hardly have failed in any age to devote itself to literature; in his own age this devotion was especially inevitable. Montaigne: his references to literature. That his dealings with the subject are dealings in the height of his own fashion, it is unnecessary to say. Not many things could be more characteristic than the Essay on Pedantry (I. 24), in which the whole spirit and motive, not merely of the Pléiade, but of the sixteenth century generally, are subjected to the irregular glancing criticism of the essayist. This single paper would enable one to understand the fling of a man like Ben Jonson—the reverse of unintelligent, the reverse of unhumorous, but full of erudition, and of sixteenth-century reverence for it—at “All the essayists, even their master Montaigne.” On the general question whether what is commonly called pedantry is a good or a bad thing, Montaigne’s verdict comes simply to a “Mass! I cannot tell!” He bestows hearty praise on Du Bellay, a non-pedantic and courtier-like man of letters, who yet was enthusiastic for learning; heartier on Adrian Turnebus, a pedant in the common injurious sense; and in the middle of his essay he plays on study of Greek and Latin, on quotations from Plato and Cicero, on “arming oneself against the fear of death, at the cost and charges of Seneca.”[192] The much longer 139chapter on Education, addressed to Diane de Foix, which immediately follows, contains one of the worst expressions of Renaissance contempt of mediæval literature, in the boast that “of the Lancelots of the Lake, the Amadis, the Huons of Bordeaux, with which childhood amuses itself,” he did not know so much as the name. “My Lord Michael” is great, but even he might have been greater if he had known them.

Indeed hardly anywhere does Montaigne exhibit his own undulation and diversity more fully than in relation to letters—at one time amassing ancient instances as if he were totally oblivious of the remarks above about Plato and Seneca; at another criticising for himself[193] with inimitable freshness and gusto; and at another again informing the scholar, with much coolness, that if he will take off hood and gown, drop Latin, and not deafen men’s ears with unmitigated Aristotle, he will be at the level of all the world, and perhaps below it.

Even this, it will be seen, is not so very far from the cardinal Pléiade principle, that study of the ancients is an excellent thing, but that its chief value is to equip and strengthen the student for practice in French. And Montaigne, like the rest of his contemporaries and compatriots, always had this “cultivation of the garden” before him. It is well known how the real pedants of his own time objected to his neologisms, just as Fontaine (or whoever was the author of the Quintil) did to those of Du Bellay; and how large a part these neologisms played in the development and nourishing of French prose. Every one who knows anything of Montaigne knows his enthusiastic eulogy of Amyot, and of the services which that grant translateur had rendered to French. And everybody should know the delicate and subtle appreciation which he lavishes, in a fashion so different from the indiscriminate laudations of Scaliger, on favourite passages of the ancients, more particularly[194] on the Venus and Vulcan passage of Virgil, and the Venus and Mars passage of Lucretius.

140Of course Montaigne’s interests, despite his exquisite literary accomplishment, are not primarily literary. The Essay On Books. But he has given one entire Essay (II. 10), and that not of the shortest, to Books; and he has frequent glancings at the subject, sometimes characteristically racy, as that at the Heptameron, “un gentil livre pour son estoffe.” The “Books” essay begins with one of his familiar jactations of imperfection. He has some reading, but no faculty of retention. He often intentionally plagiarises—for instance from Plutarch and Seneca. He does not seek in books anything more than amusement and knowledge of himself and of life. He refuses to grapple—at any great expense of labour—with difficulties. He likes Rabelais, Boccaccio, and Johannes Secundus for mere pastime, but repeats his depressing scorn for romances, and confesses, as did Darwin on the score of Shakespeare, that he cannot take the pleasure he used to take in Ariosto and Ovid. He thinks Virgil, Lucretius, Horace, and Catullus (especially Virgil in the Georgics and the Fifth Æneid) at the top of poetry—a grouping which makes us long to pin the elusive Perigourdin down, and force him, Proteus as he is, to give us his exquisite reasons. His judgment on Lucan is a little commonplace, “not the style but the sentiments”—whereas the sentiments of Lucan are but Roman “common form,” and his style, if not of the best kind, is great in a kind not the best. He thinks Terence “the very darling and grace of Latin,” and is half apologetic as to the equalling of Lucretius to Virgil, positively violent (it is, he thinks, bestise et stupidité barbarique)[195] on that of Virgil to Ariosto, and depressing again in regard to Plautus (Terence sent bien mieux son gentilhomme). He returns again and again to the style of Terence; and warns us of the coming classicism by his objections to the “fantastiques élévations Espagnoles et Pétrarchistes,” being equally “correct” in exalting (or at least in his reasons for the exaltation, there being no doubt about the fact) Catullus above Martial. On Greek authors as such he frankly and repeatedly declares his incompetence to give judgment; but “now that Plutarch has 141been made French,” he can as frankly yoke him once more with Seneca, and extol the pair super æthera, boldly expressing his comparative distaste for Cicero. He would like to have “a dozen of [Diogenes] Laertius,” for the “human document,” of course; and puts Cæsar above all other historians, including Sallust, while he has something to say of divers French writers of the class—Froissart (who, he thinks, gives “the crude matter of history”), Comines, Du Bellay-Langey, and others. It is to be noted that in this place he says nothing about French poetry. And when he does take up the subject much later, in II. 17, at the end of the “Essay on Presumption,” he is very brief, only saying that he thinks Ronsard and Du Bellay “hardly far from the ancient perfection.” At the beginning of II. 36 he divides with the majority on the merits of Homer and Virgil, though he once more admits a disqualification, which in this case is, of course, total. And in the famous remark,[196] “Poetry is an amusement proper for women; it is a frolic and subtle art, disguised, talkative, quite occupied with pleasure and display, like them,” he gives no doubt a certain measure of his critical capacity in less specially conditioned matters.

This capacity is, indeed, strictly limited. Montaigne is almost, if not quite, as much set as his beloved Plutarch on the life-side of literature, as the only one that really interests him; and, in addition, he has an obstinate prosaic inclination, with which Plutarch does not seem to be nearly so chargeable. Yet he must have found mention here, not merely as our first very great French man of letters,[197] who has left us literary opinions, but as the very light and glory of the French intellect at the meeting of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and as thus giving an index of the greatest value to its tastes and opinions. He displays (conditioning it in the ways just mentioned, 142and others, by his intense idiosyncrasy) the general literary attitude of the time—an active, practical, striving towards performance, a rather conventional and arbitrary admiration of the farther past, a contempt, or at least good-natured underestimation, of the nearer, and fair, if vague, hopes for the future. But considering the intensely critical character of Montaigne’s intellect in most directions, its exertions in this direction tell us even more by what they do not, than by what they do.


157. See Petit de Julleville, ii. 392, who quotes four between c. 1405 and c. 1475; and for a monograph E. Langlois, De Artibus Rhetoricæ Rythmicæ, Paris, 1890. To this may be added, as commentaries on this chapter, the corresponding division in Spingarn, op. cit., Part II., pp. 172-250; the extensive and valuable Introduction to M. Georges Pellissier’s edition of Vauquelin de la Fresnaye (Paris, 1885); and Herr Rücktaschel’s Einige Arts Poétiques aus der Zeit Ronsards und Malherbes (Leipsic, 1889).

158. L’Art et Science de Rhétorique, 1493, printed by Verard, and reprinted by Crapelet. Another, a little later, was printed about 1500, and reprinted in the Bibliothèque Elzévirienne, Anciennes Poésies Françaises, iii. 118. It is odd that M. Petit de Julleville, who does not give the volume and page of that very extensive collection, and misquotes its title, should speak of this as “in prose.” It is in verse: divided under short headings, sometimes of teaching, sometimes of example, as in this notable “Rondel équivoqué,Avoir, Fait Avoir Avoir, Avoir Fait-Avoir, Fait, where each word is a line. The interpretation may be left as a treat for the reader.

159. L’Instructif de la seconde Rhétorique, or Le Jardin de Plaisance.

160. Grant et vray art de pleine Rhétorique, Rouen, 1521.

161. Rhétorique Métrifiée, Paris, 1539. Between Fabri and Gratien du Pont appeared in 1529 Geoffrey Tory’s Champfleury, a more grammatical than critical miscellany, which is elsewhere glanced at; and the very noteworthy critical remarks prefixed by Marot to his edition of Villon in 1533. M. Gaston Paris is assuredly right when he calls this (in his charming little book on the author of the Ballade des Pendus, Paris, 1901) “un des plus anciens morceaux de critique littéraire que l’on ait écrits en français,” and its appreciative sympathy, if not co-extensive with the merits of the work, leaves little to desire in the points which it touches. In fact, the mere selection of Villon and of the Roman de la Rose, as the subjects of his editorial care, shows in Master Clement the presence of a deep instinctive critical faculty, which has only partially and incidentally developed itself. In this, as in not a few other points, Marot himself seems to me to have had for the most part inadequate justice from critics; though here as elsewhere it may be allowed that time and circumstance prevented him from doing himself justice. His intense affection for literature and poetry, the light glancing quality of his wit and intellect, the absence of all pomposity, pedantry, and parade, and the shrewd sense which (in judgment if not quite in conduct) distinguished him, go very far to constitute the equipment of the accomplished critic. But his short life, perhaps a certain instability of character, and the immature condition of the special state of literature in his time, with the ever-deplorable distractions of the religious upheaval, gave him little chance.

162. With the Lyons reprint (v. infra) of Sibilet and the Quintil Horatien is given an Autre Art Poétique, short and strictly practical. It notices Ronsard, but gives the old forms.

163. It would be clearly improper to load this book with much general French literary history. But those who would thoroughly appreciate the position may find an endeavour to put it briefly in my Short History of the subject, Book II. chaps, i., ii., and iv. (6th ed., Oxford, 1901). If they want more they had better go to MM. Darmesteter and Hatzfeld’s admirable Seizième Siècle in France (Paris, 1878), or, best of all, to the last 150 pp. of the first vol. of Crepet’s Poètes Français. M. Ch. d’Héricault’s prefaces here, with his introduction to Marot (ed. Garnier), are not likely to be soon equalled.

164. For a poet of such eminence and a book of such importance, Du Bellay and the Défense are curiously difficult of access. M. Marty-Laveaux' ed. of the Works, with the Pléiade generally (Paris, 1876), is very scarce and dear. M. Becq de Fouquières’ Selections are, it is said, out of print, though they can be obtained. A Versailles reprint I know only through the British Museum Catalogue. It is odd how, in almost all languages, reprinting, like a more agreeable, if less troublesome, process, seems to “go by favour.”

165. That quoted supra, at i. 316.

166. Of course in an earlier stage you do get much more. English, for instance, profited almost infinitely by translation from French and from Latin prose in the late fourteenth century, and throughout the fifteenth. But French was past this stage, or nearly past it, when Du Bellay wrote.

167. L’Evolution des genres (Paris, 1890), p. 43 sq.

168. M. Brunetière quotes this famous and striking expression, but complains that we are not told how it is to be done. Our English supplies a sufficient reply to this in famous words, “by reading, marking, learning, and inwardly digesting.”

169. The small space given to the Défense here may seem inconsistent with the importance assigned to it. The fact is, however,—and this fact no doubt explains to some extent, if it does not excuse, the views of those who do not think it very important,—that its details require little notice. Its claim lies in its eager eloquence, in the new position sketched above, and (negatively) in its onslaught on the forms of French poetry for two hundred years past. Du Bellay’s critical views reappear in the “Epistle to the Reader” in his Olive (ed. Becq de Fouquières, pp. 67-76), in that prefixed to his Vers Traduits (ibid., pp. 151-157), in the vigorous defence of vernacular verse addressed to the second of the three Valois Marguerites (ibid., pp. 127-129), and elsewhere.

170. Others call it Le Quintil Censeur. It appears not unnecessary to say that “Quintil” has not, and could not have, any reference to “Quintilian,” but refers to the Quintilius of Horace (Art. Po., 438). The original edition seems to be very rare: the British Museum only possesses the Lyons reprint (with Sibilet) of 1556. It seems to have been also reprinted with Du Bellay at Versailles in 1878, but this I do not possess. Some make the title Horatian or Horace.

171. “Vermeille” with him is “vermeilhæ”; “voix,” “voès”; “neigeux,” “negeus”; Lucan, “Lukein,” &c.

172. Œuvres Complètes, ed. Blanchemain, 8 vols., Paris, 1857-1867. They are not quite “complete,” but the omissions (which may be found, if anybody wants them, in such respectable works as the Cabinet Satirique &c.) fortunately do not concern us.

173. In ed. of Vauquelin (sup. cit.), xxviii. sq.

174. Ed. cit., vii. 317-337

175. Alphonse Delbène, Abbé of Haute-Combe in Savoy.

176.

“Jewels five words long
That on the stretched forefinger of all time
Sparkle for ever.”
Tennyson, The Princess.

177. Ed. cit., iii. 7-39.

178. Plustost à la façon d’une missive, ou de quelques lettres royaux, que d’un poème bien prononcé.

179. Principalement des boucliers.

180. Odd as these things may seem, they are not fool-born jests of an idle historian. Ronsard actually says them, though at greater length. See p. 28, “Su“Su tu veux faire mourir sur-le-champ quelque capitaine, il le faut navrer au plus mortel lieu du corps, comme le cerveau, le cœur, la gorge,” &c., &c.; and, p. 29, “Car s’il fait bouillir de l’eau en un chaudron,” &c., &c.

181. In the Prefatory Discourse to his Mort de César (1562). He extols Aristotle and Horace, but does not like Seneca.

182. In the prefatory matter of his Saül le Furieux, 1572. Jean assails the native drama, especially the Moralities, and thinks highly of Seneca.

183. La Manière de faire des vers en Français comme en Grec et en Latin, Paris, 1573. There is a useful abstract of this in Rücktaschel, op. cit., pp. 23-27.

184. L’art Poétique Français, Paris, 1598. This, like almost all the works noticed in this chapter, is but a little book, odd to compare with the close-packed Italian quartos. But it is longer than most of its fellows.

185. Some abatement, however, may be claimed, if only on the ground that Laudun is absolutely sound on the vernacular question.

186. M. Pellissier, to whose already cited edition the references following are made.

187. I agree with Mr Spingarn (p. 187) and disagree with M. Pellissier (p. xxxviii) in thinking that this reference to Minturno is quite serious. The French editor, indeed, speaks of Minturno rather oddly, coupling him with Vida as “les deux poètes Italiens,” and saying that both “ne font que remâcher les préceptes des anciens,” which Vauquelin only says of Vida. This is of more than doubtful justice as to Minturno, and why call him a “poet”? He may have written in verse on other occasions, for aught I know, but his two Poetics are as unquestionably in prose as Vida’s one is in verse.

188. Oste moy la Ballade, oste moy le Rondeau.

189. Inst. Orat., II. xiii. 13. The anecdote in Quintilian is very simple: Apelles paints Antigonus in profile to hide a lost eye. Vauquelin (on uncertain authority) expands this into a long story of a competition between Polygnotus, Scopas, and Diocles.

190. The Recherches have not been completely reprinted, I think, since 1723. All their literary matter, however, is included in M. Léon Feugère’s extremely useful and well-edited Œuvres Choisies d’E. P. (2 vols., Paris, 1849). It extends from i. 230 to ii. 134, what follows on the University of Paris being itself not quite irrelevant.

191. Difficult, that is, to appraise critically—not to understand.

192. Vol. i. p. 165, ed. Courbet and Royer. Je n’aime point cette suffisance relative et mendiée, he goes on with his own absolute and unborrowed stamp of phrase and epithet.

193. Cf., for instance, the remarkable critical comparison of Tacitus and Seneca in the Eighth Essay of the Third Book, towards the close (iv. 37 ed. cit.)

194. If there is anywhere a happier critical phrase, in its particular kind, than “cette noble circumfusa, mère du gentil infusus,” I do not know it.

195. Ed. cit., ii. 112. Most of the expressions quoted are in the immediate context.

196. III. 3, Les Trois Commerces, ed. cit., iii. 288.

197. Rabelais is no real exception. It is needless to say that Gargantua and Pantagruel do contain matter touching on literature. But Rabelais comes too early to be critical. The “Library of Saint-Victor” and other things are simply alarums and excursions of his general campaign against the rearguard of “monkish ignorance”; and in his references to French poetry he does not seem to have got beyond—or to have wished to get beyond—complacent acquiescence in rhétoriqueur pedantry.

143

CHAPTER V.

ELIZABETHAN CRITICISM.

BACKWARDNESS OF ENGLISH CRITICISM NOT IMPLYING INFERIORITY—ITS CAUSE—THE INFLUENCE OF RHETORIC AND OTHER MATTERS—HAWES—THE FIRST TUDOR CRITICS—WILSON: HIS ‘ART OF RHETORIC’; HIS ATTACK ON “INKHORN TERMS”—HIS DEALING WITH FIGURES—CHEKE: HIS RESOLUTE ANGLICISM AND ANTI-PRECIOSITY—HIS CRITICISM OF SALLUST—ASCHAM—HIS PATRIOTISM—HIS HORROR OF ROMANCE, AND OF THE ‘MORTE D’ARTHUR’—HIS GENERAL CRITICAL ATTITUDE TO PROSE, AND TO POETRY—THE CRAZE FOR CLASSICAL METRES—SPECIAL WANTS OF ENGLISH PROSODY—ITS KINDS: (1) CHAUCERIAN—(2) ALLITERATIVE—(3) ITALIANATED—DEFICIENCIES OF ALL THREE—THE TEMPTATIONS OF CRITICISM IN THIS RESPECT—ITS ADVENTURERS: ASCHAM HIMSELF—WATSON AND DRANT—GASCOIGNE—HIS ‘NOTES OF INSTRUCTION’—THEIR CAPITAL VALUE—SPENSER AND HARVEY—THE PURITAN ATTACK ON POETRY—GOSSON—‘THE SCHOOL OF ABUSE’—LODGE’S ‘REPLY’—SIDNEY’S ‘APOLOGY FOR POETRY’—ABSTRACT OF IT—ITS MINOR SHORTCOMINGS AND MAJOR HERESIES—THE EXCUSES OF BOTH, AND THEIR AMPLE COMPENSATION—KING JAMES’S ‘REULIS AND CAUTELIS’—WEBBE’S ‘DISCOURSE’—SLIGHT IN KNOWLEDGE, BUT ENTHUSIASTIC, IF UNCRITICAL, IN APPRECIATION—PUTTENHAM’S (?) ‘ART OF ENGLISH POESIE’—ITS ERUDITION—SYSTEMATIC ARRANGEMENT AND EXUBERANT INDULGENCE IN FIGURES—MINORS: HARINGTON, MERES, WEBSTER, BOLTON, ETC.—CAMPION AND HIS ‘OBSERVATIONS’—DANIEL AND HIS ‘DEFENCE OF RHYME’—BACON—THE ‘ESSAYS’—THE ‘ADVANCEMENT OF LEARNING’—ITS DENUNCIATION OF MERE WORD-STUDY—ITS VIEW OF POETRY—SOME “OBITER DICTA”—THE WHOLE OF VERY SLIGHT IMPORTANCE—STIRLING’S “ANACRISIS”—BEN JONSON: HIS EQUIPMENT—HIS ‘PREFACES,’ ETC.—THE DRUMMOND CONVERSATIONS—THE ‘DISCOVERIES’—FORM OF THE BOOK—ITS DATE—MOSAIC OF OLD AND NEW—THE FLING AT MONTAIGNE—AT ‘TAMERLANE’—THE SHAKESPEARE PASSAGE—AND THAT ON BACON—GENERAL CHARACTER OF THE BOOK.

The fortune of England in matters political has often been noticed; and it has at least deserved to be noticed, hardly less 144often, in matters literary. One of the luckiest of these chances came at the time of the Renaissance; when the necessary changes were effected with the minimum of direct foreign influence, and so slowly that the natural force of the nation and the language was able completely, or almost completely, to assimilate the influences, both foreign and classical, that rained upon it.

Nor was this least the case in respect of criticism.[198] The history of this part of English literary evolution has been, until recently, much neglected; and it can hardly be said even yet to have received comprehensive attention. Backwardness of English Criticism not implying inferiority. It is all the more necessary to bestow some time and pains on it here, with at least some fair hope of correcting an unfair depreciation. The Baron of Bradwardine (displaying that shrewd appreciation of contrast between English and Scottish characteristics which belonged, if not to himself, to his creator) remarked to Colonel Talbot that it was the Colonel’s “humour, as he [the Baron] had seen in other gentlemen of birth and honour” in the Colonel’s country, “to derogate from the honour of his burgonet.” Gentlemen of the most undoubted birth and honour (as such things go in literature), from Dryden to Matthew Arnold, have displayed this humour in regard to English criticism. But there has been something too much of it; and it has been taken far too literally by the ignorant. M. Brunetière has expressed his opinion that Frenchmen would make un véritable marché de dupe if they exchanged Boileau, Marmontel, La Harpe, and Co. for Lessing and some others. I shall not in this place express any opinion on that question directly. But, if this book does what I shall endeavour to make it do, it will at least show that to exchange, for any foreign company, our own critics, from Sidney and Ben Jonson, through Dryden and Addison, 145Samuel Johnson and Coleridge, Lamb and Hazlitt, to Mr Arnold himself, would be “un véritable marché de”—Moses Primrose.

It will have been sufficiently seen in the last volume that the backwardness of English—a backwardness long exaggerated, but to some extent real, and to no small extent healthy—was nowhere exhibited more distinctly than in the department which supplies the materials of this history. Until the close of the fifteenth century, and for some decades afterwards, not a single critical treatise on English existed in the English language, or even in Latin; the nearest approach, even in fragment, to any utterance of the kind being the naïf and interesting, but only infantinely critical, remarks of Caxton in his prefaces.[199]

The fact is that, not only until a nation is in command of a single form of “curial” speech for literary purposes, but until sufficient experiments have been made in at least a majority of the branches of literature, criticism is impossible, and would, if possible, be rather mischievous than beneficial. Its cause. Now England, though it possessed at least one very great author, and more than a fair number of respectable seconds to him, was, up to 1500 at least, in neither case. Till the end of the fourteenth century it had been practically trilingual; it was bilingual till past the end of the fifteenth, if not till far into the seventeenth, so far as literature was concerned. Nor, till the towering eminence of Chaucer had helped to bring the vernacular into prominence, was there any one settled dialect of primacy in the vernacular itself. Further, the fifteenth century was nearly at its end before any bulk of prose, save on religious subjects, was written; and for another century the proportion of translation over original work in prose was very large indeed.

At the same time the scholastic Rhetoric—which had always played to criticism the part of a half-faithless guardian, who keeps his pupil out of the full enjoyment of his property, 146yet preserves that property in good condition to hand over to him perforce at some future time—was still faithfully taught.[200] The influence of Rhetoric and other matters. The enlarged and more accurate study of the classics at the Revival of Learning set classical criticism once more before students in the originals; the eager study of those originals by Continental scholars was sure to reflect itself upon England; and, lastly, religious zeal and other motives combined, here as elsewhere, to make men determined to get the vernacular into as complete and useful a condition as possible. Nowhere does the intense national spirit, which is the glory of the Tudor period, appear more strongly than in this our scholastic and “umbratile” division of the national life.

Long, indeed, before this scholastic and regular criticism made its appearance, and during the whole course of the fifteenth century, critical appreciation, stereotyped and unmethodised it may be, but genuine for all that, and stimulating, had made its appearance. Hawes. The extraordinary quality of Chaucer, the amiable pastime-making of Gower, and, a little later, the busy polygraphy and painful rhetoric of Lydgate, had, almost from the moment of Chaucer’s death, attracted and inspired students. The pretty phrase about Chaucer’s “gold dew-drops of speech,” which justly drew the approval of a critic so often unjustly severe on ante-Renaissance work as Mr Arnold, was, as is known even by tyros in the study of English literature, repeated, expanded, varied by almost every prominent writer for a century and a quarter at least, till it reaches, not exactly final, but most definite and noteworthy, expression in the work of Stephen Hawes, that curious swan-singer of English mediæval poetry. In the to us eccentric, if not positively absurd, exposition of the Trivium and Quadrivium which diversifies the account of the courtship 147of Grandamour and La Bell Pucell,[201] the praise of the Three is led up to by a discussion of Rhetoric and Poetics so elaborate and minute that it occupies more space than is given to all the other Arts together, and nearly double that which is given to all the rest, except a largely extended Astronomy. Rhetoric herself, after being greeted by and greeting her pupil in the most “aureate” style, divides herself into five parts, each of which has its chapter, with a “Replication against ignorant Persons” intervening, and many curious digressions such as the description of a sort of Earthly Paradise of Literature with four rivers, “Understanding,” “Closely-Concluding,” “Novelty,” and “Carbuncles,”[202] and a “Tower of Virgil” in their midst. Lydgate has been already praised for “versifying the depured rhetoric in English language,” but he comes up once more for eulogy as “my master” in the peroration, and has in fact considerably more space than either Gower or Chaucer. Nor, confused and out of focus as such things must necessarily appear to us, should we forget that Hawes and his generation were not altogether uncritically endeavouring at what was “important to them”—the strengthening and enriching, namely, of English vocabulary, the extension of English literary practice and stock.

Yet their criticism could but be uncritical: and the luck above referred to appears first in the peculiar scholastic character of the criticism of the first English school of critics deserving the name. The first Tudor critics. No one of its members was exactly a man of genius, and this was perhaps lucky; for men of genius have rarely been observed to make the best schoolmasters. All were fully penetrated with the Renaissance adoration of the classics; and this was lucky again, because the classics alone could supply the training and the models just then required by English prose, and even to some extent by English poetry. All were very definitely set against Gallicising and Italianising; and yet again this was lucky, because England had been overdosed with French influence 148for centuries, while their opposition to Italian did perhaps some good, and certainly little harm. But all were thoroughly possessed by the idea that English, adjusted to classical models as far as possible, but not denationalised or denaturalised, ought to be raised into a sufficient medium of literary, as of familiar, communication for Englishmen. And—with that intense Renaissance belief in education, and a high and noble kind of education too, which puts to shame the chattering and pottering of certain later periods on this unlucky subject—all were determined, as far as in them lay, to bring English up to this point. The tendency was spread over a great number of persons, and a considerable period of time. Its representatives ranged from healthy and large-souled, if not quite heroic or inspired, scholars like Ascham to “acrid-quack” pedants like Gabriel Harvey. But the chief of these representatives were the well-known trio, of whom one has just been mentioned—Sir[203] Thomas Wilson, Sir John Cheke, and Roger Ascham. They were all friends, they were all contemporary members (to her glory be it ungrudgingly said) of one University, the University of Cambridge, and though the moral character of all, and especially of the first two, had something of the taints of self-seeking and of sycophancy, which were the blemishes of the Tudor type of writers, all had the merits of that type as exhibited in the man of the study rather than of the field—intense curiosity and industry, a real patriotism, a half-instinctive eagerness to action, a consciousness how best to adorn the Sparta that had fallen to their lot, and a business-like faculty of carrying their conceptions out. From various indications, positive and indirect, it would seem that Cheke, who was the eldest, was also the most “magnetic,” the most Socratically suggestive and germinal of the three: but his actual literary work is of much inferior importance to that of Ascham and Wilson.

Wilson’s Art of Rhetoric[204] is, as the other dates given in the 149text and notes will show sufficiently, by no means the first book of the school; nor is it that which has, on the whole, the most interest for us. Wilson: his Art of Rhetoric; But it deserves precedence historically because, as no other does, it keys, or gears, the new critical tendency on to the old technical rhetoric. The first edition appeared in 1553, dedicated to Edward VI. Wilson dates his prologue to the second[205] on the 7th December 1560; but it does not seem to have been published till 1563. Between the date of the first edition and the writing of this Prologue, Wilson, an exile at Rome, had fallen into the claws of the Inquisition as author of the book and of another on Logic; and, as he recounts with natural palpitation, escaped literally “so as by fire,” his prison-house being in flames.

His two first Books Wilson faithfully devotes to all the old technicalities—Invention, Disposition, Amplification, “States,” and the rest. his attack on “Inkhorn terms.” But his third Book, “Of Elocution,”[206] announces from the first an interest in the matter very different from the jejune rehashings of the ancients (and chiefly of those ancients least worth rehashing) which the mediæval Rhetorics mostly give us. In fact, Wilson had shown himself alive to the importance of the subject in the very opening of the work itself[207] by recounting, with much gusto, how “Phavorinus the Philosopher (as Gellius telleth the tale) did hit a young man over the thumbs very handsomely for using over-old and over-strange words.” And as soon as he has divided the requirements of Elocution under the four heads of Plainness, Aptness, Composition, and Exornation, he opens the stop which has been recognised as his characteristic one, by denouncing “strange inkhorn terms.” He inveighs against the “far-journeyed gentlemen” who, on their return home, as they love to go in foreign apparel, so they “powder their talk with oversea language,” one talking French-English, another “chopping in” with English-Italianated. Professional men, lawyers and auditors, have their turn of censure, and a real literary “document” follows in the censure of the “fine courtier 150who will talk nothing but Chaucer.” Most copious is he against undue “Latining” of the tongue, in illustration of which he gives a letter from a Lincolnshire gentleman which may owe royalty either to the Limousin Scholar of Rabelais, or even to Master Francis’ own original, Geoffrey Tory himself. And he points the same moral (very much after the manner of Latimer, for whom, as elsewhere appears, he had a great admiration) by divers facetious stories from his experience, “when I was in Cambridge, and student in the King’s College,” and from other sources. After which he falls in with Cicero as to the qualifications of words allowable.

“Aptness” follows: and here Sir Thomas, without knowing it, has cut at a folly of language revived three hundred years and more later than his own time. His dealing with Figures. For he laughs at one who, “seeing a house fair-builded,” said to his fellow, “Good Lord, what a handsome phrase of building is this!” Wilson’s butt would have been no little thought of by certain persons at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. Indeed, one may seem to remember a sentence about the merits of a “passage” in a marble chimney-piece, which is a mere echo, conscious or unconscious, of his “phrase.” The same temper appears in the longer remarks on Composition; but when we come to Exornation, “a gorgeous beautifying of the tongue with borrowed words and change of sentence,” Wilson’s lease of originality has run out. He is still in the bondage of the Figures, which he describes ambitiously as a kind “not equally sparpled[208] about the whole oration, but so dissevered and parted as stars stand in the firmament, or flowers in a garden, or pretty-devised antiques in a cloth of Arras.” The enumeration is full of character and Elizabethan piquancy; but it still has the old fault of beginning at the wrong end. When a man writes even a good oration, much more that far higher thing a good piece of prose (which may be an oration, if need serves, or anything else), he does not say to himself, “Now I shall 151throw in some hyperbaton; now we will exhibit a little anadiplosis; this is the occasion surely for a passage of zeugma.” He writes as the spirit moves him, and as the way of art leads. One could wish, in reading Wilson, for another Sir Thomas, to deal with the Figurants as he has dealt with the Chaucerists and the Lincolnshire Latinisers. But we must not expect too much at once: and lucky are we if we often, or even sometimes, get so bold a striking out into new paths for a true end as we find in this Art of Rhetoric.

Cheke has left no considerable English work, and he seems—as it is perhaps inevitable that at least some of the leaders in every period of innovation should seem—to have pushed innovation itself to and over the verge of crotchet. Cheke: his resolute Anglicism and anti-preciosity. He was a spelling and pronouncing reformer both in Greek and English; and, classical scholar and teacher as he was, he seems to have fallen in with that curious survival of “Saxon” rendering of words not of Saxon origin, the great storehouse of which is the work of Reginald Pecock a century earlier. But he appears to have been one of the main and most influential sources of the double stream of tendency observable in Wilson himself, and still more in Ascham—the tendency on the one hand to use the classics as models and trainers in the formation of a generally useful and practicable English style, and on the other to insist that neither from classical nor from any other sources should English be adulterated by “inkhorn terms,” as Wilson calls them,[209] of any kind—that is to say, by archaisms, technicalities, preciousnesses, fished up as it were from the bottom of the ink-pot, instead of simply and naturally taken as they came from its surface to the pen. What Ascham tells us that he said of Sallust is the spirit, the centre, the kernel, of the criticism of the whole school—a dread that is to say, and a dislike and a censure of what he calls the “uncontented care to write better than he could.”[210] And it must 152be obvious that this sharply formulated censure is itself a critical point de repère of the greatest value. It is well that it was not too much listened to—for the greatest results of English prose and verse in the great period, beginning a few years after Cheke’s death and continuing for an old man’s lifetime, were the result of this “never contented care,” which still reached something better than content. But if, at this early period, it had had too much way given to it, if the vigorous but somewhat sprawling infancy of Elizabethan English had been bid and let sprawl simply at its pleasure, the consequences could not but have been disastrous.

This criticism of Sallust, which may be found at length in Ascham’s Schoolmaster,[211] is quite a locus in its kind. His criticism of Sallust. It is not of the justest, for the prepossession of the sentence quoted above (which stands in the forefront of it) colours it all through. It has funny little scholastic lapses in logic, such as the attempt to apply the old brocard Orator est vir bonus dicendi peritus to the disadvantage of Sallust, as compared not only with Cicero but with Cæsar, on the score of morality. It would have been pleasant to observe the countenances of Fausta and Servilia if this had been argued in their joint presence. And the dislike of Thucydides, to which a disliker of Sallust is almost necessarily driven, argues a literary palate not of the most refined. But the disposition of the supposed causes of the faults of Sallust’s style, when, having sown his wild oats, he took to literature, and borrowed his vocabulary from Cato and Varro, and his method from Thucydides himself, is an exceedingly ingenious piece of critical pleading. Even if it will not hold water, it shows us a stage of criticism advanced, in some directions, beyond anything that classical or mediæval times can show. The other great “place” of Cheke’s writing occurs in his letter[212] to Hoby on that learned knight’s translation of Castiglione, with its solemn judgment (the author, though but in middle age, was ill, and in fact almost dying), “I am of this opinion, that our own tongue 153should be written clean and pure, unmixed and unmangled with borrowing of other tongues, wherein if we take no heed betimes, ever borrowing and never paying, she shall be fain to keep house as a bankrupt.” The analogy, of course, is a false one:—there is no need to pay, nor possibility of payment, any more than a conquering monarchy needs to fear the repayment of the tribute it draws from others, or than a sturdy plant need dread bankruptcy because it owes nourishment to earth, and air, and the rain of heaven. But once more the position is a definite, and not a wholly untenable, critical position: and Cheke shows himself here as at once engineer and captain of it.

The chief representative of this school is, however, beyond question, the always agreeable, and but seldom other than admirable, author of Toxophilus and The Schoolmaster himself.[213] Ascham. His positive achievements in English literature do not here directly concern us; nor does the debate between those who regard him as a Euphuist before Euphuism, and those who will have him to be the chief example of the plain style in early Elizabethan literature. I confess myself to be on the side of the latter; though I know what the former mean. But it is with what Ascham thought as a critic, not with what he did as a writer, that we are here busy; and on this there is no reasonable opening for serious difference of opinion. Ascham’s critical position and opinions are clear, not only from his two famous and pleasant little books, but from the constant literary references in his letters, ranging from elaborate lucubrations on the study of the classics to an amusing little Cambridge fling at the older university, where, as we learn from a letter of exactly the middle of the century, taste was in so shocking a condition that Oxford men actually paid more attention to Lucian and Apuleius than to Cicero and Xenophon.[214]

His patriotism.

154The Toxophilus itself is a critical document in parts, both for the initial manifesto of his desire “to write this English matter in the English tongue for English men,” and for the more elaborate defence of the proceeding (a defence repeated in the numerous Latin letters accompanying the copies of the book he sent to his friends), as well as for one of those hits at Romance which were characteristic of Renaissance scholars too generally, and were particularly to be expected in very moral and rather prosaic persons like Ascham. But we necessarily turn to the Schoolmaster for a full exposition of Ascham’s critical ethos, and we find it.

A tendency rather to slight poetry, one great heresy concerning it (of which more presently), and the above-mentioned contempt or even horror of romance—these are the worst things to be noted here. His horror of Romance, All these are connected with a wider critical heresy, which is prevalent in England to this day, and which emerges most interestingly in this infancy of English criticism. This heresy is the valuing of examples, and even of whole kinds, of literary art, not according to their perfection on their own artistic standards, not according to the quantity or quality of artistic pleasure which they are fitted to give; but according to certain principles—patriotic, political, ethical, or theological—which the critic holds or does not hold, as the case may be. This fallacy being one of those proper—or, at least, inseparably accidental—to the human intellect, is of course perceptible enough in antiquity itself. It is, as we have seen, rife in Plato, and more rife in Plutarch; and there is no doubt that the devotion of the Renaissance to the greatest of Greek philosophers and prosemen, to the most entertaining of Greek biographers and moralists, had not a little to do with its reappearance, though the struggle of the Reformation, and the national jealousies which this struggle bred or helped, had more. But no one has given more notable examples of it than Ascham by his attack on “books of feigned chivalry,” in Toxophilus,[215] and his well-known censure of the Morte d’Arthur in The Schoolmaster.[216]

155Than this book there was, at Ascham’s date, no more exquisite example of English prose in existence. There is not to this day a book, either in prose or in verse, which has more of the true Romantic charm. and of the Morte d’Arthur. There are few better instances anywhere of subtly combined construction of story than are to be found in some of its parts; and, to a catholic judgment, which busies itself with the matter and spirit of a book, there are few books which teach a nobler temper of mind, which inculcate with a more wonderful blending of sternness and sympathy the great moral that “the doer shall suffer,” that “for all these things God shall bring us into judgment,” or which display more accomplished patterns of man and sweeter examples of woman. Yet Ascham (and he had read the book) saw in it nothing but “open manslaughter and bold bawdry.”

Apart from this somewhat Philistine prudery—which occupies itself more reasonably with Italian novelle, and the translations of them into English—Ascham’s criticism is of a piece with that of the whole school in all but a very few points. He differed with Wilson, and with most of the scholars of his time, on the subject of translation, which he rightly enough regarded as a useful engine of education, but as quite incapable of giving any literary equivalent for the original. He agreed both with Wilson and with Cheke as to the impropriety of adulterating English with any foreign tongue, ancient or modern. He was, all the same, an exceedingly fervent Ciceronian and devotee of the golden age of Latin. And when we come in one[217] of his letters to Sturm on the name of Pigna (v. supra, p. 62), the rival of Cinthio Giraldi, there seems to be established a contact, of the most interesting, between English and Italian criticism. But (as indeed we might have expected) no allusion to Pigna’s view of the despised romances is even hinted: it is his dealing with the aureolum libellum of Horace that Ascham has read, his dealings with Aristotle and Sophocles that he wishes to read.

Putting his theory and his practice together, and neglecting 156for the moment his moral “craze,” we can perceive in him a tolerably distinct ideal of English prose, which he has only not illustrated by actual criticism of the reviewing sort, because the material was so scanty. His general critical attitude to Prose, This prose is to be fashioned with what may be excusably called a kind of squint—looking partly at Latin and Greek construction and partly at English vernacular usage. It does not seem that, great as was his reverence for Cheke, he was bitten by Cheke’s mania for absolute Teutonism; nor does he appear to have gone to the extreme of Latimer and Latimer’s admirer, Wilson, in caring to mingle merely familiar speech with his ordered vernacular. But he went some way in this direction: he was by no means proof against that Delilah of alliteration which, like a sort of fetch or ghost of the older alliterative prosody, bewitched the mid-sixteenth-century verse and prose of England, and had not lost hold on Spenser himself. And he had belief in certain simple Figures of the antithetic and parallel kind. But he was, above all, a schoolmaster—as even being dead he spoke—to English literature; and his example and his precepts together tended to establish a chastened, moderately classical, pattern of writing, which in the next generation produced the admirable English prose of Hooker, and was not without influence on the less accomplished, but more germinal and protreptic, style of Jonson.

We must praise him less when we come to poetry. and to Poetry. The history of the craze for classical metre and against rhyme in England, which practically supplies our earliest subject of purely critical debate, is a very curious one, and may—perhaps must—be considered from more points of view than one, before it is rightly and completely understood. At first sight it looks like mere mid-summer madness—the work of some Puck of literature—if not even as the incursion into the calm domains of scholarship and criticism of that popular delirium tremens, which has been often illustrated in politics. Shifting of the standpoint, and more careful consideration, will discover some excuses for it, as well as much method in it. But it must be regarded long, and examined carefully, before the real fact is discovered—the fact that, 157mischievous and absurd as it was in itself, unpardonable as are the attempts to revive it, or something like it, at this time of day, it was in its own day a kind of beneficent “distemper”—a necessary, if morbid, stage in the development of English prosody and English criticism.

Inasmuch as the most obvious and indubitable, as well as universal, cause of the craze was the profound Renaissance admiration for the classics, it was inevitable that something of the kind should make its appearance in most European countries. The craze for Classical Metres. But other and counteracting causes prevented it from assuming, in any of them, anything like the importance that it attained in England. Unrhymed classical metres, like almost every literary innovation of the time, had been first attempted in Italy;[218] but the established and impregnable supremacy of forms like the Sonnet, the Canzone, the ottava and terza rima, put rhyme out of real danger there. They were attempted in France.[219] But French had for centuries possessed a perfectly well-defined system of prosody, adapted and adequate to the needs and nature of the language. And, moreover, the singularly atonic quality of this language, its want not only of the remotest approach to quantity but even of any decided accent, made the experiment not merely ridiculous, as indeed it mostly was in English, but all but impossible. Spanish was following Italian, and did not want to follow anything else: and German was not in case to compete.

With English the patient was very much more predisposed to the disease. Special wants of English Prosody. Not only two, but practically three, different systems of prosody, which were really to some extent opposed to each other, and might well seem more opposed than they actually were, disputed, in practice, the not too fertile or flourishing field of English poetry. There was the true Chaucerian system of blended English prosody, the legitimate representative of the same composite influences which have moulded English language, and which had been slowly developed through the half-chaotic beginnings of Middle English verse, and then with almost premature suddenness 158perfected up to a certain stage by Chaucer himself. Its kinds: (1)Chaucerian. This system combined—though not yet in perfect freedom—the strict syllabic foot-division of the French with the syllabic licence of Anglo-Saxon, so as to produce a system of syllabic equivalence similar in nature to, if not yet fully in practice freer than, that of the Greek Iambic trimeter. It admitted a considerable variety of metres, the base-integers of which were the octosyllable and decasyllable, with lines of six, twelve, and others occasionally, combined in pairs or arranged in stanzas of more or less intricate forms. But—by a historic accident which has even yet to be rather taken as found than fully explained—nobody for more than a hundred years had been able to produce really good regular[220] poetry in Southern English by this metre, and certain changes in pronunciation and vocabulary—especially the disuse of the final vocalised e—were putting greater and greater difficulties in the way of its practice.

Secondly, there was the revived alliterative metre, either genuine—that is to say, only roughly syllabic and not rhymed, but rhythmed nearer to the anapæstic form than to any other—or allied with rhyme, and sometimes formed into stanzas of very considerable intricacy. (2) Alliterative. This, which had arisen during the fourteenth century, no one quite knows how or where, apparently in the North, and which had maintained a vigorous though rather artificial life during the fifteenth, had not wholly died out, being represented partly by the ballad metre, by doggerel twelves, fourteeners, and other long shambling lines, and by a still lively tendency towards alliteration itself, both in metred verse and in prose. Latterly, during Ascham’s own youth, a sort of rapprochement between these two had made the fourteeners and Alexandrines, rather less doggerelised, very general favourites; but had only managed to communicate to them a sort of lolloping amble, very grievous and sickening to the delicate ear.

(3) Italianated.

Thirdly, and in close connection with this combination, 159Wyatt, Surrey, and other poets had, by imitating Italian models, especially in the sonnet, striven to raise, to bind together, to infuse with energy and stiffen with backbone, the ungainly shambling body of English verse: and Surrey, again following the Italians, had tried, with some success, the unrhymed decasyllable soon to be so famous as blank verse.

Now critical observation at the time might survey this field with view as extensive and intensive as it could apply, and be far from satisfied with the crops produced. Deficiencies of all three. To represent the first system there was nobody but Chaucer, who, great and greatly admired as he was, was separated from the men of 1550 by a period of time almost as long as that which separates us from Pope, and by a much greater gulf of pronunciation and accent. Nobody could write like Chaucer—unless the Chaucerian Chorizontes are right in attributing The Court of Love to this time, in which case there was some one who could write very much like Chaucer indeed. There was no Langland, and nobody who could write in the least like Langland. In sheer despair, men of talent like Skelton, when they were not Chaucerising heavily, were indulging (of course with more dulcet intervals now and then) in mere wild gambades of doggerel.

But it will be said, Was there not the new Italianated style of poets of such promise as Wyatt and Surrey? There was. Yet it must be remembered that Wyatt and Surrey themselves are, after all, poets of more promise than performance; that their promise itself looks much more promising to us, seeing as we do its fulfilment in Spenser and onward, than it need have done, or indeed could do, to contemporaries; that stalwart Protestants and stout Englishmen feared and loathed the Italianation of anything English; and lastly, that even the prosody of Wyatt and Surrey is, in a very high degree, experimental, tentative, incomplete. We laugh, or are disgusted, at the twists and tortures applied by the hexametrists to our poor mother tongue; but Wyatt at least puts almost as awkward constraints on her.

It is not surprising that in the presence of these unsatisfying 160things, and in the nonage of catholic literary criticism, men should have turned for help to those classics which were the general teachers and helpers of the time. The temptations of Criticism in this respect. There was indeed—already published just as Ascham had attained his year of discretion—a treatise, by the greatest man of letters for some fifteen hundred years at least, which contained the germ of a warning. But it is not likely that Ascham or any of his good Cambridge friends had seen Trissino’s translation of the De Vulgari Eloquio; and, if any had, it would have been a stroke of genius to carry Dante’s generalisation from the Romance tongues further. To almost any man of the Renaissance it would have seemed half sacrilege and half madness to examine ancient and modern literatures on the same plane, and decide what was germane to each and what common to all. Greek Prosody had been good enough, with very minor alterations, for Latin; how should any of these upstart modern tongues refuse what had been good enough for both? And let it be remembered, too, that they were only half wrong. Greek and Latin did provide up to a certain point—that of the foot as distinguished from the metre—examples which, duly guarded, could be quite safely followed, which indeed could not and cannot be neglected without loss and danger for English. It was when they went further, and endeavoured to impose the classical combinations of feet on English, that they fell.

Yet even from the first they had glimpses and glimmerings of truth which might have warned them; while in their very errors they often display that combination of independence and practical spirit which is the too often undervalued glory of English criticism. Its adventurers: Ascham himself. Ascham himself—besotted as he is with wrath[221] against “our 161rude beggarly rhyming,” confident as he is that the doggerel of his old friend Bishop Watson of Lincoln—

“All travellers do gladly report great praise of Ulysses,
For that he knew many men’s manners, and saw many cities,”—

exhibits[222] as “right quantitie” of syllables and true order of versifying as either Greek or Latin—yet saw[223] that “our English tongue doth not well receive the nature of Carmen Heroicum, because dactylus, the aptest foot for that verse, is seldom found in English.” Truly it is not; your dactyl is apt to play the “Waler”—to buck under an English rider, and either throw him altogether, or force the alteration of the pace to anapæsts. The best apparent dactylics in English—the verses of Kingsley’s Andromeda—are not really dactylic-hexameters at all, they are five-foot anapæstics, with a very strong anacrusis at the beginning, and a weak hypercatalectic syllable at the end. And with this fatal confession of Ascham (who had not a very poetical head), that of Campion, an exquisite poet and a keen though warped critic, coincides, as we shall see, a generation later. But the thing had to be done; and it was done, or at least attempted.

When the craze first took form in England we do not exactly know. Ascham observes vaguely that “this misliking of rhyming beginneth not now of any newfangle singularity, but hath been long been misliked, and that of men of greatest learning and deepest judgment.”[224] Watson and Drant. We all think that the persons who agree with us are men of great learning and deep judgment, so that matter may be passed over. But apparently the thing was one, and not the best, of the fruits of that study of the classics, and specially of Greek, which, beginning at Oxford, passed thence to Cambridge, and was taken up so busily in Ascham’s own college, St John’s. Thomas Watson,[225] 162the Bishop of Lincoln, above referred to, was Master of the College; Ascham himself, it is hardly necessary to say, was a fellow of it. And still descending in the collegiate hierarchy, it was an undergraduate of St John’s, Thomas Drant, who somewhat later drew up rules for Anglo-Classic versifying—rules that occupied Spenser and Harvey, with the result of producing some interesting letters and some very deplorable doggerel. Drant seems to have been the “legislator of Parnassus” to the innovators; but we have little work of his, and that little does not bear on the special subject.

Mischievous craze as it was, however,[226] it had the merit of turning the attention of Englishmen to really critical study of poetry, and it appears, more or less, as the motif of most of the group of critical writings, from Gascoigne’s Notes of Instruction to Daniel’s Defence of Rhyme, which we shall now discuss.

In the most interesting little treatise[227] which heads or initials[228] the now goodly roll of books in English criticism, George Gascoigne, though he was himself a Cambridge man, does not make any reference to the craze. Gascoigne. The tract was written at the request of an Italian friend, Eduardo Donati. It is exceedingly short; but as full of matter, and very good matter, as need be. In duty bound Gascoigne begins with insistence on fine invention, without which neither “thundering in rym ram ruff, quoth my master Chaucer,” nor “rolling in pleasant words,” nor “abounding in apt vocables,” will suffice. But he passes over this very swiftly, as over trite and obvious expressions,[229] suitableness of phrase, &c., and attacks the great literary question of the time, Prosody.

163He begins his attack by the modest and half-apologetic request, “This may seem a presumptuous order,” that, whatever the verse chosen be, it be regular, and not wobbling backwards and forwards between twelve and fourteen syllables on no principle. His Notes of Instruction. Then he enjoins the maintenance of regular and usual accent or quantity; and in so doing insists on a standard in regard to which not merely Wyatt and Surrey earlier, but even Spenser later, were much less scrupulous. “Treasure,” he says, you must use with the first syllable long and the second short: you must not make it “treasùre.” And then he makes a very curious observation:—

“Commonly nowadays in English rhymes, for I dare not call them English verses, we use none other order but a foot of two syllables,” to wit, the Iamb. “We have,” he says, “in other times used other kinds of metres,” as

"No wight | in the world | that wealth | can attain,"[230]

(i.e., anapæsts), while “our Father Chaucer had used the same liberty in feet and measures that the Latinists do use,” that is to say, syllabic equivalence of two shorts to a long. And he laments the tyranny of the Iamb; but says, “we must take the ford as we find it.”

Then, after some particular cautions,—a renewed one as to quantifying words aright—“understànd,” not “undérstand,” &c., as to using as many monosyllables as possible (it is amusing to read this and remember the opposite caution of Pope),—he comes to rhyme, and warns his scholar against rhyme without reason. Alliteration is to be moderate: you must not “hunt a letter to death.” Unusual words are to be employed carefully and with a definite purpose to “draw attentive reading.” Be clear and sensible.[231] Keep English order, and invert substantive and adjective seldom and cautiously. Be moderate in the use 164also of that “shrewd fellow, poetical licence,” who actually reads "hea|ven" for "heavn"![232]

As for the pause or Cæsura, Gascoigne is not injudicious. “The pause,” he says, “will stand best in the middle” of an octosyllable, at the fourth syllable in a “verse of ten,” at the sixth (or middle again) of an Alexandrine, and at the eighth in a fourteener. But it is at the discretion of the writer in Rhythm royal: “it forceth not where the pause be till the end of the line”—and this liberty will assuredly draw to more.

Next he enumerates stanzas:—Rhyme royal itself, ballades, sonnets, Dizains, and Sixains, Virelays, and the “Poulter’s measure,” of twelve and fourteen alternately, to which his own contemporaries were so unfortunately addicted. You must “finish the sentence and meaning at the end of every staff”: and (by the way) he has “forgotten a notable kind of rhyme called riding rhyme, which is what our father Chaucer used in his Canterbury tales, and in divers other delectable and light enterprises.” It is good for “a merry tale,” Rhyme royal for a “grave discourse,” Ballads and Sonnets for love-poems, &c., and it would be best, in his judgment, to keep Poulter’s measure for Psalms and hymns. And so he makes an end, “doubting his own ignorance.”

The chief points about this really capital booklet are as follows:—Gascoigne’s recognition of the importance of overhauling English Prosody; his good sense on the matter of the cæsura, and of Chaucer’s adoption of the principles of equivalenced scansion; his acknowledgment with regret of the impoverishment which, in the sterility of the mid-sixteenth century before Spenser, was a fact, as resulting from the tyranny of the iamb; the shrewdness of his general remarks; and, last but not least, his entire silence about the new versifying, the “Dranting of Verses.” Their capital value. It is possible (for though he was at Cambridge he seems to admit that he did not acquire 165any great scholarship there) that he had not come into contact with any one who took interest in this: but it is improbable that it would have appealed to his robust sense of poetry, unsicklied by Harvey’s pedantry, and not misled by Spenser’s classical enthusiasm.

At this time, however, or not long after—the Notes must have been written between 1572 and 1575, and the correspondence of Spenser and Harvey actually appeared in 1579—these other persons were thinking a great deal about the classical metres. The Five Letters (“Three” and “Two”[233]—not to be confused with the Four Letters which Harvey issued long afterwards about Greene) are full of the subject, and of poetical criticism generally. They, together with the controversy which arose over Gosson’s School of Abuse, and which indirectly produced Sidney’s Apology for Poetry, make the years 1579-1580 as notable in the history of English criticism as the appearances of Euphues and The Shepherd’s Calendar make them in that of creative literature.

Spenser’s first letter informs Harvey that “they [Sidney and Dyer] have proclaimed in their ἀρειωπάγῳ[234] [the literary cénacle of Leicester House] a general surceasing and silence of bald rhymers, and also of the very best too: instead whereof they have, by the authority of their whole Senate, prescribed certain laws and rules of quantities of English syllables for English verse, having had thereof already great practice, and drawn me to their faction.” Spenser and Harvey. And later, “I am more in love with English versifying than with rhyming, which I should have done long since if I would have followed your counsel.” He hints, however, gently, that Harvey’s own verses (these coterie writers always keep the name “verses” for their hybrid abortions) once or twice “make a breach in Master Drant’s rules.” Which was, of course, a very dreadful thing, only to be “condoned tanto poetæ.” He requites Harvey with a few Iambics, which he “dare warrant precisely perfect for the feet, and varying not one 166inch from the Rule.” And then follows the well-known piece beginning—

“Unhappy verse, the witness of my unhappy state,”

where certainly the state must have been bad if it was as infelicitous as the verse.

Not such was Gabriel Harvey that he might take even a polite correction; and his reply is a proper donnish setting-down of a clever but presumptuous youth. He respects the Areopagus—indeed they were persons of worship, and Harvey was a roturier—more than Spenser can or will suppose, and he likes the trimeters (indeed, though poor things, they were Spenser’s own after all, and such as no man but Spenser could have written in their foolish kind) more than Spenser “can or will easily believe.” But—and then follows much reviewing in the now stale hole-picking kind, which has long been abandoned, save by the descendants of Milbourne and Kenrick, and a lofty protestation that “myself never saw your gorbellied master’s rules, nor heard of them before.”

The Three Letters which follow[235] are distributed in subject between an Earthquake (which has long since ceased to quake for us) and the hexameters. They open with a letter from Spenser, in which he broaches the main question, “Whether our English accent will endure the Hexameter?” and doubts. Yet he has a hankering after it, encloses his own—

“See ye the blindfoldèd pretty god, that feathered archer,” &c.,

and prays that Harvey would either follow the rules of the great Drant, indorsed by Sidney, or else send his own. Harvey replies in double. The first part is some very tragical mirth about the earthquake; the second, “A Gallant Familiar Letter,” tackles the question of versification.

This gallant familiarity might possibly receive from harsh critics the name of uneasy coxcombry; but it is at any rate clear that the author has set about the matter very seriously. He expresses delight that Sidney and Dyer, “the two very diamonds of her Majesty’s Court,” have begun to help forward 167“the exchange of barbarous and balductum[236] rhymes with artificial verses”; thinks their “lively example” will be much better than Ascham’s “dead advertisement” in the Schoolmaster. He would like (as should we) to have Drant’s prosody. His own Rules and Precepts will probably not be very different; but he will take time before drafting them finally. He thinks (reasonably enough) that before framing a standard English Grammar or Rhetoric (therein including Prosody), a standard orthography must first be agreed upon. And he suggests that “we beginners” (this from the author of these truly “barbarous and balductum” antics to the author of the Faerie Queene is distinctly precious) have the advantage, like Homer and Ennius, of setting examples. “A New Year’s Gift to M. George Bilchaunger,” in very doleful hexameters, follows, and after a little gird at Spenser’s “See ye the Blindfoldèd,” another sprout of Harvey’s brain in the same kind, which has been, perhaps, more, and more deservedly, laughed at than any of these absurdities, except the scarcely sane jargon-doggerel of Stanyhurst—

“What might I call this tree? a Laurell? o bonny Laurell!
Needs to thy boughs will I bow this knee, and veil my bonetto;”

with yet another—

“Since Galateo[237] came in, and Tuscanism gan usurp.”

He thinks that the author of this last “wanted but some delicate choice elegant poesy” of Sidney’s or Dyer’s for a good pattern. After some further experiments of his own, or his brother’s, in hexametring some of Spenser’s own “emblems” in the Calendar, he turns to Spenser himself, whom, it seems, he ranks next the same “incomparable and miraculous genius in the catalogue of our very principal English Aristarchi.” He 168proceeds to speak of some of that earlier work which, as in The Dying Pelican, is certainly, or in the Dreams, possibly, lost. After which he writes himself down for all time in the famous passage about the Faerie Queene, which he had “once again nigh forgotten,” but which he now sends home “in neither better nor worse case than he found her.” “As for his judgment,” he is “void of all judgment if Spenser’s Nine Comedies [also lost] are not nearer Ariosto’s than that Elvish Queene is to the Orlando, which” Spenser “seems to emulate, and hopes to overgo.” And so he ends his paragraph with the yet more famous words, “If so be the Faery Queene be fairer in your eye than the Nine Muses, and Hobgoblin run away with the garland from Apollo, mark what I say, and yet I will not say what I thought, but there an end for this once, and fare you well till God or some good Angel put you in a better mind!” Which words let all who practise criticism grave in their memories, and recite them daily, adding, “Here, but for the grace of God——!” if they be modest and fear Nemesis.

After an interval, however, Harvey returns to actual criticism, and shows himself in rather better figure by protesting, in spite of “five hundred Drants,” against the alteration of the quantity of English words by accenting “Majesty” and “Manfully,” and “Carpenter” on the second syllable. And he falls in with Gascoigne on the subject of such words as “Heaven.” Nor could he, even if he had been far less of a pedant and coxcomb, have given better or sounder doctrine than that with which he winds up. “It is the vulgar and natural mother Prosody, that alone worketh the feat, as the only supreme foundress and reformer of Position, Diphthong, Orthography, or whatsoever else; whose affirmatives are nothing worth if she once conclude the negative.” And for this sound doctrine, not unsoundly enlarged upon, and tipped with a pleasant Latin farewell to “mea“mea domina Immerita, mea bellissima Collina Clouta”, let us leave Gabriel in charity.[238]

The Puritan attack on Poetry.

169Meanwhile the strong critical set of the time—so interesting, if not so satisfying, after the absolute silence of criticism in English earlier—was being shown in another direction by a different controversy, to which, as we have seen, Spenser makes allusion. The points which chiefly interested him at the moment were formal; those to which we now come were partly of the same class though of another species, partly transcending form.

Stephen Gosson is one of the persons of whom, as is by no means always the case, it would really be useful to know more than we do know about their private history and character. Gosson. What disgust, what disappointment, what tardy development of certain strains of temper and disposition he underwent, we do not know; but something of the kind there must have been to make a young man of four-and-twenty, a fair scholar, already of some note for both dramatic and poetical writing, and obviously of no mean intellectual powers, swing violently round, and denounce plays, and poems, and almost literature generally, as the works of the Devil. It is quite insufficient to ejaculate “Puritanism!” or “Platonism!” for neither of these was a new thing, and the question is why Gosson was not affected by them earlier or later.

Let us, however, now as always, abstain from speculation when we have fact; and here we have at least three very notable facts—Gosson’s School of Abuse,[239] with its satellite tractates, Lodge’s untitled Reply,[240] and the famous Defence of Poesy or Apology for Poetry[241] which Sidney (to whom Gosson had rashly dedicated his book) almost certainly intended as a counterblast, though either out of scorn, as Spenser hints, or (more probably from what we know of him) out of amiable 170and courteous dislike to requite a compliment with an insult, he takes no direct notice of Gosson at any time.

The School of Abuse (which is written in such a style as almost to out-Euphuise the contemporary Euphues itself) is critical wholly from the moral side, and with reference to the actual, not the necessary or possible, state of poetry. The School of Abuse. There are even, the author says, some good plays, including at least one of his own; but the whole of ancient poetry (he says little or nothing of modern) is infected by the blasphemy and immorality of Paganism, and nearly the whole of the modern stage is infected by the abuses of the theatre—of which Gosson speaks in terms pretty well identical with those which Puritan teachers had for some years past been using in sermon and treatise. But outside of the moral and religious line he does not step: he is solely occupied with the lies and the licence of poets and players.

Lodge’s reply (the title-page of it has been lost, but it may be the Honest Excuses to which Gosson refers as having been published against him) is almost entirely an appeal to authority, seasoned with a little personal invective. Lodge’s Reply. Lodge strings together all the classical names he can think of, with a few mediæval, to show that Poetry, Music (which Gosson had also attacked), and even the theatre, are not bad things. But he hardly attempts any independent justification of them as good ones, especially from the purely literary point of view. In fact, his pamphlet—though interesting as critical work from the associate of great creators in drama, himself a delightful minor poet and no contemptible pioneer of English prose fiction—is merely one of the earliest adaptations in English of an unreal defence to an attack, logically as unreal though actually dangerous. The charlatan-geniuses of the Renaissance, with Cornelius Agrippa[242] at their head, had refurbished the Platonic arguments for the sincere but pestilent reformers of the Puritan type. Lodge and his likes, in all countries from Italy outwards and from Boccaccio downward, accept the measure of the shadowy daggers of their opponents, and attempt to meet them with weapons 171of similar temper. The only reality of the debate is in its accidents, not in its main purport. But the assailants, in England at least, had for the time an unfair advantage, because the defence could point to no great poet but Chaucer. The real answer was being provided by one of themselves in the shape of The Faerie Queene.

Sidney’s book, though pervaded by the same delusion, is one of far more importance. Sidney’s Apology for Poetry. It is not free from faults—in fact, it has often been pointed out that some of Sidney’s doctrines, if they had been accepted, would have made the best efforts of Elizabethan literature abortive. But the defects of detail, of which more presently, are mixed with admirable merits; the critic shows himself able, as Gosson had not been able, to take a wide and catholic, instead of a peddling and pettifogging, view of morality. Instead of merely stringing authorities together like Lodge, he uses authority indeed, but abuses it not; and while not neglecting form he does not give exclusive attention to it.

His main object, indeed (though he does not know it), is the defence, not so much of Poetry as of Romance. He follows the ancients in extending the former term to any prose fiction: but it is quite evident that he would have, in his mimesis, a quality of imagination which Aristotle nowhere insists upon, and which is in the best sense Romantic. And of this poetry, or romance, he makes one of the loftiest conceptions possible. All the hyperboles of philosophers or of poets, on order, justice, harmony, and the like, are heaped upon Poetry herself, and all the Platonic objections to her are retorted or denied.[243]

It has been said that there is no direct reference to Gosson 172in the Apology, though the indirect references are fairly clear. Abstract of it. Sidney begins (in the orthodox Platonic or Ciceronian manner) somewhat off his subject, by telling how the right virtuous Edward Wotton, and he himself, once at the Emperor’s Court learnt horsemanship of John Pietro Pugliano, the Imperial Equerry, and recounting with pleasant irony some magnifying of his office by that officer. Whence, by an equally pleasant rhetorical turn, he slips into a defence of his office—his “unelected vocation” of poet. Were not the earliest and greatest authors of all countries, Musæus, Homer, Hesiod, in Greece (not to mention Orpheus and Linus), Livius Andronicus and Ennius among the Romans, Dante, Boccaccio, and Petrarch in Italy, Chaucer and Gower for “our English”—were they not all poets? Even the philosophers in Greece used poetry, and Plato himself is a poet almost against his will. Herodotus called his nine books after the Muses; and he and all historians have stolen or usurped things of poetry. Wales, Ireland, “the most barbarous and simple Indians,” are cited. Nay, further, did not the Romans call a poet vates, a “prophet”? and, by presumption, may we not call David’s psalms a divine poem? Whatever some may think,[244] it is no profanation to do so. For what is a poet? What do we mean by adopting that Greek title for him? We mean that he is a maker. All other arts and sciences limit themselves to nature; the poet alone transcends it, improves it, makes, nay, brings it (“let it not be deemed too saucy a comparison”) in some sort into competition with the Creator Himself whom he imitates.

The kinds of this imitation are then surveyed—“Divine,” “Philosophical,” and that of the third or right sort, who only imitate to invent and improve, which neither divine nor philosophic poets can do. These classes are subdivided according to their matter—heroic, tragic, comic, &c.—or according to the sorts of verses they liked best to write in, “for, indeed, the greatest part of poets have apparelled their poetical inventions in that numerous kind of writing which is called verse—indeed but apparelled, verse being but an ornament and no cause to poetry.” And again, “it is not rhyming and versing that 173maketh a poet.” Xenophon and Heliodorus were both poets in prose.

Now let us “weigh this latter part of poetry first by works and then by parts,” having regard always to the “Architectonice or mistress-knowledge,” the knowledge of a man’s self, ethically and politically. Philosophy, history, law, &c., are then “weighed” against poetry at some length: and the judgment of Aristotle that Poetry is philosophoteron and spoudaioteron than history, is affirmed chiefly on the odd ground of poetical justice,—the right always triumphing in poetry though not in fact. Instances of the moral and political uses of poetry follow. Then for the parts. Pastoral, comedy, tragedy, &c., are by turns surveyed and defended; and it is in the eulogy of lyric that the famous sentence about Chevy Chase[245] occurs. After this, and after a stately vindication of Poetry’s right to the laurel, he turns to the objections of the objectors. Although repeating the declaration that “rhyming and versing make not poetry,” he argues that if they were inseparable,[246] verse is the most excellent kind of writing, far better than prose. As to the abuses of poetry, they are but abuses, and do not take away the use, as is proved by a great number of stock examples.

Why, then, has England grown so hard a stepmother to poets? They are bad enough as a rule, no doubt; though Chaucer did excellently considering his time. The Mirror for Magistrates is good; so is Surrey; and The Shepherd’s Calendar “hath much poetry,” though “the old rustic language” is bad, since neither Theocritus, nor Virgil, nor Sannazar has it. And what is the reason of our inferiority? The neglect of rule. From this point onwards Sidney certainly “exposes his legs to the arrows” of those who ignore the just historic estimate. He pours ridicule on all our tragedies except Gorboduc, and still more on our mongrel tragi-comedies. We must follow the Unities, which, as it is, are neglected even in Gorboduc, “how much more in all the rest?” Whence he proceeds (unconscious 174how cool the reductio ad absurdum will leave us) to the famous ridicule of “Asia on the one side and Africa on the other,” of “three ladies walking to gather flowers,” and how the same place which was a garden becomes a rock, and then a cave with a monster, and then a battlefield with two armies—of the course of two lives in two hours’ space, &c. And he concludes with some remarks on versification, which we should gladly have seen worked out. For he does not now seem to be in that antagonistic mood towards rhyme which Spenser’s letters to Harvey discover in him. On the contrary, he admits two styles, ancient and modern, the former depending on quantity, the latter depending on “number,” accent, and rhyme. He indeed thinks English fit for both sorts, and denies “neither sweetness nor majesty” to rhyme, but is, like almost all his contemporaries and followers (except Gascoigne partially), in a fog as to “numbers” and cæsura. The actual end comes a very little abruptly by an exhortation of some length, half humorous, half serious, to all and sundry, to be “no more to jest at the reverent title of a rhymer.”

The importance of this manifesto, both symptomatically and typically, can hardly be exaggerated. Its minor shortcomings It exposes the temper of the generation which actually produced the first-fruits of the greatest Elizabethan poetry; it served as a stimulant and encouragement to all the successive generations of the great age. That Sidney makes mistakes both in gross and detail—that he even makes some rather serious mistakes from the mere “point of view of the examiner”—is of course undeniable. He has a good deal of the merely traditional mode of Renaissance respect for classical—and for some modern—authority. That, for instance, there is a good deal to be said, and that not only from the point of view of Ben Jonson, against Spenser’s half-archaic half-rustic dialect in the Calendar, few would refuse to grant. But Theocritus did use dialect: it would not in the least matter whether either he or Virgil did not; and if it did, what has the modern and partly vernacular name of Sannazar to do with the matter? It can only be replied that Spenser, by permitting “E. K.'s” annotation, did much to invite this sort of criticism; and that Englishmen’s reluctance 175to rely on the inherent powers of the English language was partly justified (for hardly any dead poet but Chaucer and no dead prose-writers but Malory and perhaps Berners deserved the title of “great”), partly came from very pardonable ignorance.

It has been already observed that Sidney is by no means peremptory about the “new versifying”; and in particular has absolutely none of the craze against rhyme as rhyme which animated persons of every degree of ability, from Milton to Stanyhurst, during more than a century. His remarks on versification are, however, too scanty to need much comment.

There remain his two major heresies, the declaration that verse is not inseparable from poetry, and the denunciation of tragi-comedy. and major heresies. In both the authority of the ancients must again bear good part of the blame, but in both he has additional excuses. As to the “pestilent heresy of prose poetry,” he is at least not unwilling to argue on the hypothesis that verse were necessary to poetry, though he does not think it is. He is quite sure that verse is anyhow a nobler medium than prose. As for the plays, there is still more excuse for him. His classical authorities were quite clear on the point; and as yet there was nothing to be quoted on the other side—at least in English. Spanish had indeed already made the experiment of tragi-comic and anti-unitarian treatment; but I do not think any of the best Spanish examples had yet appeared, and there is great difference between the two theatres. In English itself not one single great or even good play certainly existed on the model at Sidney’s death; and, from what we have of what did exist, we can judge how the rough verse, the clumsy construction, or rather absence of construction, the entire absence of clear character-projection, and the higgledy-piggledy of huddled horrors and horseplay, must have shocked a taste delicate in itself and nursed upon classical and Italian literature. The excuses of both, And it is noteworthy that even Gorboduc, with all its regularity and “Senecation,” does not bribe Sidney to overlook at least some of its defects. He is here, as elsewhere,—as indeed throughout,—neither blind nor bigoted. He is only in the position of a man very imperfectly supplied with actual experiments and observations, confronted 176with a stage of creative production but just improving from a very bad state, and relying on old and approved methods as against new ones which had as yet had no success.

And had his mistakes been thrice what they are, the tone and temper of his tractate would make us forgive them three times over. and their ample compensation. That “moving of his heart as with a trumpet” communicates itself to his reader even now, and shows us the motion in the heart of the nation at large that was giving us the Faerie Queene, that was to give us Hamlet and As You Like It. What though the illustrations sometimes make us smile? that the praise of the moral and political effects of poetry may sometimes turn the smile into a laugh or a sigh? Poetry after all, like all other human things, has a body and a soul. The body must be fashioned by art—perhaps the body is art; but the soul is something else. The best poetry will not come without careful consideration of form and subject, of kind and style; but it will not necessarily come with this consideration. There must be the inspiration, the enthusiasm, the afflatus, the glow; and they are here in Sidney’s tractate. Nor must we fail to draw attention, once more, to the difference of the English critical spirit here shown as regards both Italian and French.

In the decade which followed,[247] three notable books of English criticism appeared, none of them exhibiting Sidney’s afflatus, but all showing the interest felt in the subject, and one exceeding in method, and at least attempted range, anything that English had known, or was to know, for more than a century. King James’s Reulis and Cautelis. These were King James the First’s (as yet only “the Sixth’s”) Reulis and Cautelis to be observit and eschewit in Scottis Poesie, 1585; William Webbe’s Discourse of English Poesie, next year; and the anonymous Arte of English Poesie, which appeared in 1589, and which (on rather weak evidence, but with no counter-claimant) is usually attributed to George Puttenham.[248]

177The first is the slightest; but it is interesting for more than its authorship. It was attached to James’s Essays of a Prentice in the Divine Art, of which it gives some rules: it shows that Buchanan had taken pains with his pupil; and it also exhibits that slightly scholastic and “peddling,” but by no means unreal, shrewdness and acumen which distinguished the British Solomon in his happier moments. It is characteristic that James is not in the least afraid of the charge of attending to mint, anise, and cumin. He plunges without any rhetorical exordium into what he calls “just colours”—do not rhyme on the same syllable, see that your rhyme is on accented syllables only, do not let your first or last word exceed two or three syllables at most. This dread of polysyllables, so curious to us, was very common at the time: it was one of the things from which Shakespeare’s silent sovereignty delivered us by such touches of spell-dissolving mastery as

“The multitudinous seas incarnadine.”

Then he passes to feet, of which he practically allows only the iamb; while he very oddly gives the word “foot” to the syllable, not the combination of syllables; and lays down the entirely arbitrary rule that the number of “feet”—i.e., syllables—must be even, not odd. There is to be a sharp section (“cæsura”) in the middle of every line, long or short; and the difference of long, short, and “indifferent” (common) feet or syllables is dwelt upon, with its influence of “flowing,” as the King calls rhythm. Cautions on diction follow, and some against commonplaces, which look as if the royal prentice had read Gascoigne, a suggestion confirmed elsewhere.[249] Invention is briefly touched; and the tract finishes with a short account of the kinds of verse: “rhyme”—i.e., the heroic couplet, “quhilk servis onely for lang historieis”; a heroical stanza of nine lines, rhymed aabaabbab; ottava rima, which he calls “ballat royal”; rhyme royal, which he calls “Troilus verse”; “rouncifals,” or “tumbling verse” (doggerel alliterative, with bob and wheel); sonnets; “common” verse (octosyllable couplets); “all kinds of broken or cuttit verse,” &c.

The tract is, as has been said, interesting, because it is an 178honest, and by no means unintelligent, attempt to make an English prosody, with special reference to a dialect which had done great things in its short day, but which had been specially affected—not to say specially disorganised—by the revived and bastard alliteration of the fifteenth century. Probably it was the study of French (where the iamb had long been the only foot) which, quite as much as mere following of Gascoigne, induced James to extend that crippling limitation to English; and the same influence may be seen in his insistence on the hard-and-fast section. These things (the latter of which at least rather endeared him to Dr Guest)[250] are, of course, quite wrong; but they express the genuine and creditable desire of the time to impose some order on the shambling doggerel of the generation or two immediately preceding. We find the same tendency even in Spenser, as far as rigid dissyllabic feet and sections are concerned; and it is certainly no shame for the Royal prentice to follow, though unknowing, the master and king of English poetry at the time when he wrote.

One would not, however, in any case have expected from James evidence of the root of the matter in poetry. Webbe’s Discourse. There is more of this root, though less scholarship and also more “craze,” in the obscure William Webbe, of whom we know practically nothing except that he was a Cambridge man, a friend of Robert Wilmot (the author of Tancred and Gismund) and private tutor to the sons of Edward Sulyard of Flemyngs, an Essex squire. The young Sulyards must have received some rather dubious instruction in the classics, for Webbe, in his inevitable classical exordium, thinks that Pindar was older than Homer, and that Horace came after—apparently a good while after—Ovid, and about the same time as Juvenal and Persius. He was, however, really and deeply interested in English verse; and his enthusiasm for Spenser—“the new poet,” “our late famous poet,” “the mightiest English poet that ever lived,” is, if not in every case quite according to knowledge, absolutely right on the whole, and very pleasant and 179refreshing to read. It is, indeed, the first thing of the kind that we meet with in English; for the frequent earlier praises of Chaucer are almost always long after date, always uncritical, and for the most part[251] much rather expressions of a conventional tradition than of the writer’s deliberate preference.

It was Webbe’s misfortune, rather than his fault, that, like his idol (but without that idol’s resipiscence), and, like most loyal Cambridge men, with the examples of Watson, Ascham, and Drant before them, he was bitten with “the new versifying.” Slight in knowledge, It was rather his fault than his misfortune that he seems to have taken very little pains to acquaint himself with the actual performance of English poetry. Even of Gower he speaks as though he only knew him through the references of Chaucer and others: though three editions of the Confessio—Caxton’s one and Berthelette’s two—were in print in his time. His notice of Chaucer himself is curiously vague, and almost limited to his powers as a satirist, while he has, what must seem to most judges,[252] the astonishing idea of discovering “good proportion of verse and meetly current style” in Lydgate, though he reproves him for dealing with “superstitious and odd matters.” That he thinks Piers Plowman later than Lydgate is unlucky, but not quite criminal. He had evidently read it—indeed the book, from its kinship in parts to the Protestant, not to say the Puritan, spirit, appealed to Elizabethan tastes, and Crowley had already printed two editions of it, Rogers a third. But he makes upon it the extraordinary remark, “The first I have seen that observed the quantity of our verse without the curiosity of rhyme.” What Webbe here means by “quantity,” or whether he had any clear deliberate meaning at all, it is impossible to see: it is needless to say that Langland is absolutely non-quantitative in the ordinary sense, that if “quantity” means number of syllables he observes none, 180and that he can be scanned only on the alliterative-accentual system. For Gascoigne Webbe relies on “E. K.”; brackets “the divers works of the old Earl of Surrey” with a dozen others; is copious on Phaer, Golding, &c., and mentions George Whetstone and Anthony Munday in words which would be adequate for Sackville (who is not named), and hardly too low for Spenser; while Gabriel Harvey is deliberately ranked with Spenser himself. Yet these things, rightly valued, are not great shame to Webbe. If he borrows from “E. K.” some scorn of the “ragged rout of rakehell rhymers,” and adds more of his own, he specifies nobody; and his depreciation is only the defect which almost necessarily accompanies the quality of his enthusiasm.

His piece, though not long, is longer than those of Gascoigne, Sidney, and King James. but enthusiastic, After a dedication (not more than excusably laudatory) to his patron Sulyard, there is a curious preface to “The Noble Poets of England,” who, if they had been inclined to be censorious, might have replied that Master Webbe, while complimenting them, went about to show that the objects of his compliment did not exist. “It is,” he says, “to be wondered of all, and is lamented of many, that, while all other studies are used eagerly, only Poetry has found fewest friends to amend it.” We have “as sharp and quick wits” in England as ever were Greeks and Romans: our tongue is neither coarse nor harsh, as she has already shown. All that is wanted is “some perfect platform or Prosodia of versifying”versifying”: either in imitation of Greeks and Latins, or with necessary alterations. So, if the Noble Poets would “look so low from their divine cogitations”cogitations”, and “run over the simple censure” of Master Webbe’s “weak brain,” something might, perhaps, be done.

if uncritical,

The treatise itself begins with the usual etymological definition of poetry, as “making,” and the usual comments on the word “Vates”; but almost immediately digresses into praise of our late famous English poet who wrote the Shepherd’s Calendar and a wish to see his “English Poet” (mentioned by E. K.), which, alas! none of us have ever seen. This is succeeded, first by the classical and then by 181the English historical sketches, which have been commented upon. It ends with fresh laudation of Spenser.

Webbe then turns to the general consideration of poetry (especially from the allegoric-didactic point of view), subject, kinds, &c.; and it is to be observed that, though he several times cites Aristotle, he leans much more on Horace, and on Elyot’s translations from him and other Latins. He then proceeds to a rather unnecessarily elaborate study of the Æneid, with large citations both from the original and from Phaer’s translation, after which he returns once more to Spenser, and holds him up as at least the equal of Virgil and Theocritus. Indeed the Calendar is practically his theme all through, though he diverges from and embroiders upon it. Then, after glancing amiably enough at Tusser, and mentioning a translation of his own of the Georgics, which has got into the hands of some piratical publisher, he attacks the great rhyme-question, to which he has, from the Preface onwards, more than once alluded. Much of what he says is borrowed, or a little advanced, from Ascham; but Webbe is less certain about the matter than his master, and again diverges into a consideration of divers English metres, always illustrated, where possible, from the Calendar. Still harking back again, he decides that “the true kind of versifying” might have been effected in English: though (as Campion, with better wits, did after him) he questions whether some alteration of the actual Greek and Latin forms is not required. He gives a list of classical feet (fairly correct, except that he makes the odd confusion of a trochee and a tribrach), and discusses the liberties which must be taken with English to adjust it to some of them. Elegiacs, he thinks, will not do: Hexameters and Sapphics go best. And, to prove this, he is rash enough to give versions of his own, in the former metre, of Virgil’s first and second eclogues, in the latter of Spenser’s beautiful

“Ye dainty nymphs that in this blessed brook.”

It is enough to say that he succeeds in stripping all three of every rag of poetry. A translation of Fabricius’[253] prose syllabus 182of Horace’s rules, gathered not merely out of the Ep. ad Pisones but elsewhere, and an “epilogue,” modest as to himself, sanguine as to what will happen when “the rabble of bald rhymes is turned to famous works,” concludes the piece.

in appreciation.

On the whole, to use the hackneyed old phrase once more, we could have better spared a better critic than Webbe, who gives us—in a fashion invaluable to map-makers of the early exploration of English criticism—the workings of a mind furnished with no original genius for poetry, and not much for literature, not very extensively or accurately erudite, but intensely interested in matters literary, and especially in matters poetical, generously enthusiastic for such good things as were presented to it, not without some mother-wit even in its crazes, and encouraged in those crazes not, as in Harvey’s case, by vanity, pedantry, and bad taste, but by its very love of letters. Average dispositions of this kind were, as a rule, diverted either into active life—very much for the good of the nation—or—not at all for its good—into the acrid disputes of hot-gospelling and Puritanism. Webbe, to the best of his modest powers, was a devotee of literature: for which let him have due honour.

Puttenham—or whosoever else it was, if it was not Puttenham[254]—has some points of advantage, and one great one of disadvantage, in comparison with Webbe. Puttenham’s (?) Art of English Poesie. In poetical faculty there is very little to choose between them—the abundant specimens of his own powers, which the author or The Art of English Poesie gives (and which are eked out by a late copy of one of the works referred to, Partheniades), deserve the gibes they receive in one of our scanty early notices of the book, that by Sir John Harington (v. infra). On the other hand, Puttenham has very little of that engaging enthusiasm which atones for 183so much in his contemporary. But this very want of enthusiasm somewhat prepares us for, though it need not necessarily accompany, merits which we do not find in Webbe, considered as a critic. The Art of English Poesy, which, as has been said, appeared in 1589, three years later than Webbe’s, but which, from some allusions, may have been written, or at least begun, before it, and which, from other allusions, must have been the work of a man well advanced in middle life, is methodically composed, very capable in range and plan, and supported with a by no means contemptible erudition, and no inconsiderable supply of judgment and common-sense. It was unfortunate for Puttenham that he was just a little too old: that having been—as from a fairly precise statement of his he must have been—born cir. 1530-35, he belonged to the early and uncertain generation of Elizabethan men of letters, the Googes and Turbervilles, and Gascoignes, not to the generation of Sidney and Spenser, much less to that of Shakespeare and Jonson. But what he had he gave: and it is far from valueless.

The book is “to-deled” (as the author of the Ancren Riwle would say) into three books—“Of Poets and Poesie,” “Of Proportion,” and “Of Ornament.” Its erudition. It begins, as usual, with observations on the words poet and maker, references to the ancients, &c.; but this exordium, which is fitly written in a plain but useful and agreeable style, is commendably short. The writer lays it down, with reasons, that there may be an Art of English as of Latin and Greek poetry; but cannot refrain from the same sort of “writing at large” as to poets being the first philosophers, &c., which we have so often seen.[255] Indeed we must lay our account with the almost certain fact that all writers of this period had seen Sidney’s Defence at least in MS. or had heard of it. He comes closer to business with his remarks on the irreption of rhyme into Greek and Latin poetry; and shows a better knowledge of leonine and other mediæval Latin verse, not merely than Webbe, but even than Ascham. A very long section then deals with the question—all-interesting to a man of the Renaissance—in what 184reputation poets were with princes of old, and how they be now contemptible (wherein Puttenham shows a rather remarkable acquaintance with modern European literature), and then turns to the subject or matter of poesy and the forms thereof, handling the latter at great length, and with a fair sprinkle of literary anecdote. At last he comes to English poetry; and though, as we might expect, he does not go behind the late fourteenth century, he shows rather more knowledge than Webbe and (not without slips here and elsewhere) far more comparative judgment. It must, however, be admitted that, engaging as is his description of Sir Walter Raleigh’s “vein most lofty, insolent, and passionate,” he does not show to advantage in the patronising glance in passing at “that other gentleman who wrote the late Shepherd’s Calendar,” contrasted with the description of the Queen our Sovereign lady, “whose Muse easily surmounteth all the rest in any kind on which it may please her Majesty to employ her pen.” But here the allowance comes in: the stoutest Tory of later days can never wholly share, though he may remotely comprehend, the curious mixture of religious, romantic, patriotic, amatory, and interested feelings with which the men of the sixteenth century wrote about Gloriana.

The second book deals with Proportion, in which word Puttenham includes almost everything belonging to Prosody in its widest sense—staff, stanza, measure, metres, and feet, “cæsure,” rhyme, accent, cadence, situation (by which he means the arrangement of the rhymes), and proportion in figure. Systematic arrangement On most of these heads he speaks more or less in accordance with his fellows (though he very noticeably abstains from extreme commendation or condemnation of rhyme), save that, for the moment, he seems to neglect the “new versifying.” It is, however, but for a moment. After his chapters on “proportion” in figure (the fanciful egg, wheel, lozenge, &c., which he himself argues for, and which were to make critics of the Addisonian type half-angry and half-sad), he deals with the subject.

About this “new versifying” he is evidently in two minds. He had glanced at it before (and refers to the glance 185now)[256] as “a nice and scholastic curiosity.” However, “for the information of our young makers, and pleasure to those who be delighted in novelty, and to the intent that we may not seem by ignorance or oversight to omit,”[257] he “will now deal with it.” Which he does at great length; and, at any rate sometimes, with a clearer perception of the prosodic values than any other, even Spenser, had yet shown. But he does not seem quite at home in the matter, and glides off to a discussion of feet—classical feet—in the usual rhymed English verse.

The third book is longer than the first and second put together, and is evidently that in which the author himself took most pleasure. and exuberant indulgence in Figures. It is called “Of Ornament,” but practically deals with the whole question of lexis or style, so that it is at least common to Rhetoric and Poetics. In one respect, too, it belongs more specially to the former, in that it contains the most elaborate treatment of rhetorical figures to be found, up to its time, in English literature. Full eighty pages are occupied with the catalogue of these “Figures Auricular” wherein Puttenham (sometimes rather badly served by his pen or his printer) ransacks the Greek rhetoricians, and compiles a list (with explanations and examples) of over one hundred and twenty. It is preceded and followed by more general remarks, of which some account must be given.

Beginning with an exordial defence of ornament in general, Puttenham proceeds to argue that set speeches, as in Parliament, not merely may but ought to be couched in something more than a conversational style. This added grace must be given by (1) Language, (2) Style, (3) Figures. On diction he has remarks both shrewd and interesting, strongly commending the language of the Court and of the best citizens, not provincial 186speech, or that of seaports, or of universities, or in other ways merely technical. “The usual speech of the Court and that of London and the shires lying about London, within ten miles and not much above” is his norm. There is also a noteworthy and very early reference to English dictionaries, and a cautious section on neologisms introduced from other tongues to fill wants. Style he will have reached by “a constant and continual tenor of writing,” and gives the usual subdivision of high, low, and middle. And so to his Figures.

The details and illustrations of the long catalogue of these invite comment, but we must abstain therefrom. When the list is finished, Puttenham returns to his generalities with a discussion of the main principle of ornament, which he calls Decorum or “Decency,” dividing and illustrating the kinds of it into choice of subject, diction, delivery, and other things, not without good craftsmanship, and with a profusion of anecdotes chiefly of the Helotry kind. He then (rather oddly, but not out of keeping with his classical models) has a chapter of decorum in behaviour, turns to the necessity of concealing art, and ends with a highly flattering conclusion to the Queen.

We have yet to mention some minorities; less briefly, the two champions—Campion and Daniel, who brought the question of “Rhyme v. 'Verse'” to final arbitrament of battle; the great name (not so great here as elsewhere) of Francis Bacon; and lastly, one who, if representative of a further stage, is far the greatest of Elizabethan critics, and perhaps the only English critic who deserves the adjective great before Dryden.

The earliest (1591) of these is Sir John Harington, in the prefatory matter[258] of his translation of the Orlando, which contains the gibe at Puttenham above referred to. Minors: Harington, Meres, Webster, Bolton, &c. It is otherwise much indebted to Sidney, from whom, however, Harington differs in allowing more scope to allegorical interpretation. Then comes Francis 187Meres, whose Palladis Tamia[259] (1598) is to be eternally mentioned with gratitude, because it gives us our one real document about the order of Shakespeare’s plays, but is quite childish in the critical characterisation which it not uninterestingly attempts. Webster’s equally famous, and universally known, epitheting of the work of Shakespeare and others in the Preface to The White Devil (1612) adds yet another instance of the short sight of contemporaries; but tempting as it may be to comment on these, it would not become a Historian of Criticism to do so in this context. Sir W. Vaughan in The Golden Grove (1600) had earlier dealt, and Bolton[260] in his Hypercritica (1616), and Peacham in his Complete Gentleman (1622), were later to deal, with Poetry, but in terms adding nothing to, and probably borrowed from, the utterances of Sidney, Webbe, and Puttenham. Their contributions are “sma’ sums,” as Bailie Nicol Jarvie says, and we must neglect them.

The most interesting literary result of the “new versifying” craze is to be found, without doubt, in the Observations in the Art of English Poesy of Thomas Campion[261] and the subsequent Defence of Rhyme of Samuel Daniel. Campion and his Observations. The former was issued in 1602, and the latter still later:—that is to say more than twenty years after Spenser’s and Harvey’s letters, and more than thirty after the appearance—let alone the writing—of Ascham’s Schoolmaster. In the interval the true system of English prosody had put itself practically beyond all real danger; but the critical craze had never received its quietus. Nay, it survived to animate Milton: and there are persons whom we could only name for the sake of honour, and who do not seem to see that it is dead even yet. Both the writers mentioned were true poets: and 188the curious thing is that the more exquisitely romantic poet of the two was the partisan of classical prosody. But Campion—who dedicated his book to Lord Buckhurst, the doyen (except poor old Churchyard) of English poetry at the time, and one whose few but noble exercises in it need hardly vail their crest to any contemporary poetry but Spenser’s and Shakespeare’s—was far too wise a man, as well as far too good a poet, to champion any longer the break-neck and break-jaw hexameters of Harvey and Stanyhurst. We have seen that almost from the first there had been questions of heart among the partisans of the New Versifying. That English is not tolerant of dactyls—that the dactyl, do what you will, in English, will tilt itself into an anapæst with an anacrusis—is a truth which no impartial student of metre with an ear, and with an eye to cover the history of English poetry, can deny. Some even of these pioneers had seen this: Campion has the boldness to declare it in the words, “It [the dactylic hexameter] is an attempt altogether against the nature of our language.” But though he was bold so far, he was not quite bold enough. He could not surmount the queer Renaissance objection to rhyme. That all the arguments against the “barbarism” of this tell equally against Christianity, chivalry, the English constitution, the existence of America, gunpowder, glass-windows, coal-fires, and a very large number of other institutions of some usefulness, never seems to have occurred to any of these good folk. But no man can escape his time. Campion, not noticing, or not choosing to notice, the intensely English quality of the anapæst, limits, or almost limits, our verse to iambs and trochees. It was possible for him—though it still appears to be difficult for some—to recognise the tribrach, the mere suggestion of which in English verse threw Dr Guest into a paroxysm of “!!!!’s,” but which exists as certainly as does the iamb itself. On the contrary he shows himself in advance of Guest, and of most behind Guest to his own time, by admitting tribrachs in the third and fifth places. Nay, he even sees that a trochee may take the place of an iamb (Milton’s probably borrowed secret) in the first place, though his unerring ear (I think there is no verse of Campion’s that is unmusical) insists on some other foot 189than an iamb following—otherwise, he says, “it would too much drink up the verse.” But, on the whole, he sets himself to work, a self-condemned drudge, to make iambic and trochaic verses without rhyme. And on these two, with certain licences, he arranges schemes of English elegiacs, anacreontics, and the rest. Some of the examples of these are charming poems, notably the famous “Rose-Cheeked Laura,” and the beautiful “Constant to None,” while Campion’s subsequent remarks on English quantity are among the acutest on the subject. But the whole thing has on it the curse of “flying in the face of nature.” You have only to take one of Campion’s own poems (written mostly after the Observations) in natural rhyme, and the difference will be seen at once. It simply comes to this—that the good rhymeless poems would be infinitely better with rhyme, and that the bad ones, while they might sometimes be absolutely saved by the despised invention of Huns and Vandals, are always made worse by its absence.

In the preface of Daniel’s answering Defence of Rhyme to all the worthy lovers and learned professors [thereof] within His Majesty’s dominions,[262] he says that he wrote it “about a year since,” upon the “great reproach” given by Campion, and some give it the date of 1603 or even 1602; but Dr Grosart’s reprint is dated five years later. Daniel and his Defence of Rhyme. The learned gentleman to whom it was specially written was no less a person than William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, whom some of us (acknowledging that the matter is no matter) do not yet give up as “Mr W. H.” The advocate affects, with fair rhetorical excuse (though of course he must have known that the craze was nearly half a century old, and had at least not been discouraged by his patron’s uncle nearly a generation before), to regard the attack on rhyming as something new, as merely concerned with the “measures” of Campion. Daniel, always a gentleman, deals handsomely with his antagonist, whom he does not name, but describes as “this detractor whose commendable rhymes, albeit now an enemy to rhyme, have given heretofore to the world the best notice of his worth,” and as a man “of fair parts and good reputation.” And having put 190himself on the best ground, in this way, from the point of view of morals and courtesy, he does the same in matter of argument by refusing to attack Campion’s “numbers” in themselves (“We could,” he says well, “have allowed of his numbers, had he not graced his rhymes”), and by seizing the unassailable position given by custom and nature—“Custom that is before all law; Nature that is above all art.” In fact, not Jonson himself, and certainly none else before Jonson, has comprehended, or at least put, the truth of the matter as Daniel puts it, that arbitrary laws imposed on the poetry of any nation are absurd—that the verse of a language is such as best consorts with the nature of that language. This seems a truism enough perhaps; but it may be very much doubted whether all critics recognise it, and its consequences, even at the present day. And it is certain that we may search other early English critics in vain for a frank recognition of it. With an equally bold and sure foot he strides over the silly stuff about “invention of barbarous ages” and the like. Whatever its origin (and about this he shows a wise carelessness), it is “an excellence added to this work of measure and harmony, far happier than any proportion quantity could ever show.” It “gives to the ear an echo of a delightful report,” and to the memory “a deeper impression of what is delivered.” He is less original (as well as, some may think, less happy) in distinguishing the accent of English from the quantity of the classical tongues; but the classicisers before Campion, if not Campion himself, had made such a mess of quantity, and had played such havoc with accent, that he may well be excused. The universality of rhyme is urged, and once more says Daniel (with that happy audacity in the contemning of vain things which belongs to the born exploders of crazes), “If the barbarian likes it, it is because it sways the affections of the barbarian; if civil nations practise it, it works upon their hearts; if all, then it has a power in nature upon all.” But it will be said, “Ill customs are to be left.” No doubt: but the question is begged. Who made this custom “ill”? Rhyme aims at pleasing—and it pleases. Suffer then the world to enjoy that which it knows and what it likes, for all the tyrannical rules of rhetoric cannot make it otherwise. Why are we to be 191a mere servum pecus, only to imitate the Greeks and Latins? Their way was natural to them: let ours be so to us. “Why should laboursome curiosity still lay affliction on our best delights?” Moreover, to a spirit whom nature hath “fitted for that mystery,” rhyme is no impediment, “but rather giveth wings to mount.” The necessary historical survey follows, with a surprising and very welcome justification of the Middle Ages against both Classics and Renaissance. “Let us,” says this true Daniel come to judgment, “go not further, but look upon the wonderful architecture of the State of England, and see whether they were unlearned times that could give it such a form?” And if politically, why not poetically? Some acute and, in the other sense, rather sharp criticism of Campion’s details follows, with a few apologetic remarks for mixture of masculine and feminine rhymes on his own part: and the whole concludes in an admirable peroration with a great end-note to it. Not easily shall we find, either in Elizabethan times or in any other, a happier combination of solid good sense with eager poetic sentiment, of sound scholarship with wide-glancing intelligence, than in this little tractate of some thirty or forty ordinary pages, which dispelled the delusions of two generations, and made the poetical fortune of England sure.

The contributions of “large-browed Verulam” to criticism have sometimes been spoken of with reverence: and it is not uncommon to find, amid the scanty classics of the subject, which until recently have been recommended to the notice of inquirers, not merely a place, but a place of very high honour, assigned to The Advancement of Learning. Bacon. Actual, unprejudiced, and to some extent expert, reference to the works, however, will not find very much to justify this estimate: and, indeed, a little thought, assisted by very moderate knowledge, would suffice to make it rather surprising that Bacon should give us so much, than disappointing that he should give us little or nothing. A producer of literature who at his best has few superiors, and a user of it for purposes of quotation, who would deserve the name of genius for this use alone if he had no other title thereto—Bacon was yet by no means inclined by his main interests and objects, or by his temperament, either towards 192great exaltation of letters, or towards accurate and painstaking examination of them. Indeed, it is in him—almost first of all men, certainly first of all great modern men—that we find that partisan opposition between literature and science which has constantly developed since. It is true that his favourite method of examination into “forms” might seem tempting as applied to literature; and that it would, incidentally if not directly, have yielded more solid results than his Will-o'-the-wisp chase of the Form of Heat. But this very craze of his may suggest that if he had undertaken literary criticism it would have been on the old road of Kinds and Figures and Qualities, in which we could expect little but glowing rhetorical generalisation from him.

Nor is the nature of such small critical matter as we actually have from him very different. The Essays. The Essays practically give us nothing but the contents of that Of Studies, a piece too well known to need quotation; too much in the early pregnant style of the author to bear compression or analysis; and too general to repay it. For the critic and the man of letters generally it is, in its own phrase, to be not merely tasted, nor even swallowed, but chewed and digested; yet its teachings have nothing more to do with the critical function of “study” than with all others.

The Advancement[263] at least excuses the greatness thrust upon it in the estimates above referred to, not merely by the apparent necessity that the author should deal with Criticism, but by a certain appearance of his actually doing so. The Advancement of Learning. Comparatively early in the First Book he tackles the attention to style which sprang up at the Renaissance, opening his discussion by the ingenious but slightly unhistorical attribution of it to Martin Luther, who was forced to awake all antiquity, and call former times to his succour, against the Bishop of Rome. Not a few names, for the best part of two centuries before the great cause of Martinus v. 193Papam was launched, from Petrarch and Boccaccio to Erasmus and Reuchlin, will put in evidence before the tribunal of chronology against this singular assertion; and though the Italian Humanists of the fifteenth century might not (at least in thought) care anything for the Pope except as a source of donatives and benefices, it is certain that most of them were as constitutionally disinclined to abet Luther as they were chronologically disabled from in any way abetting him. Bacon’s argument and further survey are, however, better than this beginning. To understand the ancients (he says justly enough) it was necessary to make a careful study of their language. Further, the opposition of thought to the Schoolmen naturally brought about a recoil from the barbarisms of Scholastic style, and the anxiety to win over the general imprinted care and elegance and vigour on preaching and writing. All this, he adds as justly, turned to excess. Its denunciation of mere word-study. Men began to “hunt more after words than matter; more after the choiceness of the phrase and the round and clean composition of the sentence, and the sweet falling of the clauses, and the varying and illustration of their words with tropes and figures, than after the weight of matter, worth of subject, soundness of argument, life of invention, or depth of judgment.” The Ciceronianism of Osorius, Sturm, “Car of Cambridge,” and even Ascham, receives more or less condemnation; and Erasmus is, of course, cited for gibes at it. On this text Bacon proceeds to enlarge in his own stately rhetoric, coolly admitting that it “is a thing not hastily to be condemned, to clothe and adorn the obscurity even of philosophy itself with sensible and plausible elocution.” But he very quickly glides off into his usual denunciations of the schoolmen. Nor have I found anything else in this First Book really germane to our purpose; for one cannot cite as such the desultory observations on patronage of literature (among other branches of learning) which fill a good part of it.

The Second Book is somewhat more fruitful in quantity, if not very much; but the quality remains not very different. The opening “Address to the King” contains, in an interesting first draft (as we may call it), the everlasting grumble of the 194scientific man, that science is not sufficiently endowed, the further grumble at mere book-learning, the cry for the promotion—by putting money in its purse—of research. The Second and Third Chapters contain some plans of books drawn up in Bacon’s warm imaginative way, especially a great series of Histories, with the History of England for their centre. And then we come, in the Fourth Chapter, to Poesy.

But except for Bacon’s majestic style (which, however, by accident or intention, is rather below itself here) there is absolutely nothing novel. Its view of Poetry. The view (which, as we have seen, all the Elizabethan critics adopted, probably from the Italians)—the view is that poetry is just a part of learning licensed in imagination; a fanciful history intended to give satisfaction to the mind of man in things where history is not; something particularly prevalent and useful in barbarous ages; divisible into narrative, representative and allusive; useful now and then, but (as Aristotle would say) not a thing to take very seriously. Yet poetry, a vinum dæmonum at the worst, a mere illusion anyhow, is still, even as such, a refuge from, and remedy for, sorrow and toil. Of its form, as distinguished from its matter, he says,[264] “Poetry is but a character of style, and belongeth to arts of speech, and is not pertinent for the present.” He attempts no defence of it as of other parts of learning, because “being as a plant that cometh of the lust of the earth without a formal seed, it hath sprung up and spread abroad more than any other kind.” And he turns from it to philosophy, with the more than half-disdainful adieu, “It is not good to stay too long in the theatre.”

We might almost quit him here with a somewhat similar leave-taking; but for his great reputation some other places shall be handled. Some obiter dicta. At XIV. 11 there are some remarks on the delusive powers of words; at XVI. 4, 5 some on grammar and rhetoric, including a rather interesting observation, not sufficiently expanded or worked out, that “in modern languages it seemeth to me as free to make new measures of verses as of dances”; in XVIII. a handling of strictly oratorical rhetoric, with a digression to these “Colours 195of Good and Evil” which interested Bacon so much; in XX. another descant on the same art; in XXI. a puff of the Basilikon Doron; in XXXII. observations on the moral influence of books; in XXXV. some general observations on literature; and, just before the close, a well-known and often-quoted eulogy, certainly not undeserved, of the eloquence of the English pulpit for forty years past.

If it were not for the singular want of a clear conception of literary Criticism, which has prevailed so long and so widely, it would hardly be necessary to take, with any seriousness at all, a man who has no more than this to say on the subject.[265] The whole of very slight importance. It is most assuredly no slight to Bacon to deny him a place in a regiment where he never had the least ambition to serve. That he was himself a great practitioner of literature, and so, necessarily if indirectly, a critic of it in his own case, is perfectly true; the remarks which have been quoted above on the Ciceronians show that, when he took the trouble, and found the opportunity, he could make them justly and soundly. But his purpose, his interests, his province, his vein, lay far elsewhere. To him, it is pretty clear, literary expression was, in relation to his favourite studies and dreams, but a higher kind of pen-and-ink or printing-press. He distrusted the stability of modern languages, and feared that studies couched in them might some day or other come to be unintelligible and lost to the world. This famous fear explains the nature and the limits of his interest in literature. It was a vehicle or a treasury, a distributing agent or a guard. Its functions and qualities accorded: it was to be clear, not disagreeable, solidly constructed, intelligible to as large a number of readers as possible. The psychological character and morphological definition 196of poetry interested him philosophically. But in the art and the beauty of poetry and literature generally, for their own sakes, he seems to have taken no more interest than he did in the coloured pattern plots in gardens, which he compared to “tarts.” To a man so minded, as to those more ancient ones of similar mind whom we have discussed in the first volume, Criticism proper could, at the best, be a pastime to be half ashamed of—a “theatre” in which to while away the hours; it could not possibly be a matter of serious as well as enthusiastic study.

Between Bacon and Ben may be best noticed the short Anacrisis or Censure of Poets, Ancient and Modern,[266] by Sir William Alexander, Earl of Stirling. Stirling’s Anacrisis. It has received high praise;[267] but even those who think by no means ill of Aurora, may find some difficulty in indorsing this. It is simply a sort of “Note,” written, as the author says, to record his impressions during a reading of the poets, which he had undertaken as refreshment after great travail both of body and mind. He thinks Language “but the apparel of poesy,” thereby going even further than those who would assign that position to verse, and suggesting a system of “Inarticulate Poetics,” which he would have been rather put to it to body forth. He only means, however, that he judges in the orthodox Aristotelian way, by “the fable and contexture.” A subsequent comparison of a poem to a garden suggests Vauquelin de la Fresnaye (v. supra, p. 129), whom he may have read. Alexander is a sort of general lover in poetry; he likes this in Virgil, that in Ovid, that other in Horace; defends Lucan against Scaliger, even to the point of blaming the conclusion of the Æneid; finds “no man that doth satisfy him more than that notable Italian, Torquato Tasso”; admits the 197historical as well as the fictitious poetic subject; but thinks that “the treasures of poetry cannot be better bestowed than upon the apparelling of Truth; and Truth cannot be better apparelled to please young lovers than with the excellences of poetry.” Disrespectful language neither need nor should be used of so slight a thing, which is, and pretends to be, nothing more than a sort of table-book entry by a gentleman of learning as well as quality. But, if it has any “importance” at all, it is surely that of being yet another proof of the rapid diffusion of critical taste and practice, not of stating “theory and methods considerably in advance of the age.” If we could take extensively his protest against those who “would bound the boundless liberty of the poet,” such language might indeed be justified; but the context strictly limits it to the very minor, though then, and for long before and after, commonly debated, question of Fiction v. History in subject.

Save perhaps in one single respect (where the defect was not wholly his fault), Ben Jonson might be described as a critic armed at all points. Ben Jonson: his equipment. His knowledge of literature was extremely wide, being at the same time solid and thorough. While he had an understanding above all things strong and masculine, he was particularly addicted, though in no dilettante fashion, to points of form. His whole energies, and they were little short of Titanic, were given to literature. And, lastly, if he had not the supremest poetic genius, he had such a talent that only the neighbourhood of supremacy dwarfs it. Where he came short was not in a certain hardness of temper and scholasticism of attitude: for these, if kept within bounds, and tempered by that enthusiasm for letters which he possessed, are not bad equipments for the critic. It was rather in the fact that he still came too early for it to be possible for him, except by the help of a miracle, to understand the achievements and value of the vernaculars. By his latest days, indeed,[268] the positive performance 198of these was already very great. Spain has hardly added anything since, and Italy not very much, to her share of European literature; France was already in the first flush of her “classical” period, after a long and glorious earlier history: and what Ben’s own contemporaries in England had done, all men know. But mediæval literature was shut from him, as from all, till far later; he does not seem to have been much drawn to Continental letters, and, perhaps in their case, as certainly in English, he was too near—too much a part of the movement—to get it into firm perspective.

In a sense the critical temper in Jonson is all-pervading. It breaks out side by side with, and sometimes even within, his sweetest lyrics; it interposes what may be called parabases in the most unexpected passages[269] of his plays. His Prefaces, &c. The Poetaster is almost as much criticism dramatised as The Frogs. But there are three “places,” or groups of places, which it inspires, not in mere suggestion, but with propriety—the occasional Prefaces, or observations, to and on the plays themselves, the Conversations with Drummond, and, above all, the at last fairly (though not yet sufficiently) known Discoveries or Timber.

To piece together, with any elaboration, the more scattered critical passages would be fitter for a monograph on Jonson than for a History of Criticism. The “Address to the Readers” of Sejanus, which contains a reference to the author’s lost Observations on Horace, his Art of Poetry (not the least of such 199losses) is a fair specimen of them: the dedication of Volpone to “the most noble and most equal sisters, Oxford and Cambridge,” a better. In both, and in numerous other passages of prose and verse, we find the real and solid, though somewhat partial, knowledge, the strong sense, the methodic scholarship of Ben, side by side with his stately, not Euphuistic, but rather too close-packed style, his not ill-founded, but slightly excessive, self-confidence, and that rough knock-down manner of assertion and characterisation which reappeared in its most unguarded form in the Conversations with Drummond.

The critical utterances of these Conversations are far too interesting to be passed over here, though we cannot discuss them in full. The Drummond Conversations. They tell us that Ben thought all (other) rhymes inferior to couplets, and had written a treatise (which, again, would we had!) both against Campion and Daniel (see ante). His objection to “stanzas and cross rhymes” was that “as the purpose might lead beyond them, they were all forced.” Sidney “made every one speak as well as himself,” and so did not keep “decorum” (cf. Puttenham above). Spenser’s stanzas and matter did not please him. Daniel was no poet. He did not like Drayton’s “long verses,” nor Sylvester’s and Fairfax’s translations. He thought the translations of Homer (Chapman’s) and Virgil (Phaer’s) into “long Alexandrines” (i.e., fourteeners) were but prose: yet elsewhere we hear that he “had some of Chapman by heart.” Harington’s Ariosto was the worst of all translations. Donne was sometimes “profane,” and “for not keeping of accent deserved hanging”; but elsewhere he was “the first poet of the world in some things,” though, “through not being understood, he would perish.”[270] Shakespeare “wanted art”: and “Abram Francis (Abraham Fraunce) in his English Hexameters was a fool.” “Bartas was not a poet, but a verser, because he wrote not fiction.” He cursed Petrarch for redacting verses to sonnets, “which were like Procrustes’ bed.” Guarini incurred the 200same blame as Sir Philip: and Lucan was good in parts only. “The best pieces of Ronsard were his Odes.” Drummond’s own verses “were all good, but smelled too much of the schools.” The “silver” Latins, as we should expect, pleased him best. “To have written Southwell’s ‘Burning Babe,’ he would have been content to destroy many of his.”

These are the chief really critical items, though there are others (putting personal gossip aside) of interest; but it may be added, as a curiosity, that he told Drummond that he himself “writ all first in prose” at Camden’s suggestion, and held that “verses stood all by sense, without colours or accent” (poetic diction or metre), “which yet at other times he denied,” says the reporter, a sentence ever to be remembered in connection with these jottings. Remembering it, there is nothing shocking in any of these observations, nor anything really inconsistent. A true critic never holds the neat, positive, “reduced-to-its-lowest-terms” estimate of authors, in which a criticaster delights. His view is always facetted, conditioned. But he may, in a friendly chat, or a conversation for victory, exaggerate this facet or condition, while altogether suppressing others; and this clearly is what Ben did.

For gloss on the Conversations, for reduction to something like system of the critical remarks scattered through the works, and for the nearest approach we can have to a formal presentment of Ben’s critical views, we must go to the Discoveries.[271]

The fact that we find no less than four titles for the book—Timber, Explorata, Discoveries, and Sylva—with others of its peculiarities, is explained by the second fact that Jonson never published it. The Discoveries. It never appeared in print till the folio of 1641, years after its author’s death. The Discoveries are described as being made “upon men and matter as they have flowed out of his daily reading, or had their reflux to his peculiar notions of the times.” They are, in fact, notes 201unnumbered and unclassified (though batches of more or fewer sometimes run on the same subject), each with its Latin heading, and varying in length from a few lines to that of his friend (and partly master) Bacon’s shorter Essays. The influence of those “silver” Latins whom he loved so much is prominent: large passages are simply translated from Quintilian, and for some time[272] the tenor is ethical rather than literary. A note on Perspicuitas—elegantia (p. 7) breaks these, but has nothing noteworthy about it, and Bellum scribentium (p. 10) is only a satiric exclamation on the folly of “writers committed together by the ears for ceremonies, syllables, points,” &c. The longer Nil gratius protervo libro (pp. 11, 12) seems a retort for some personal injury, combined with the old complaint of the decadence and degradation of poetry.[273] There is just but rather general stricture in Eloquentia (p. 16) on the difference between the arguments of the study and of the world. “I would no more choose a rhetorician for reigning in a school,” says Ben, “than I would choose a pilot for rowing in a pond.”[274] Memoria (p. 18) includes a gird at Euphuism. At last we come to business. Censura de poetis (p. 21), introduced by a fresh fling at Euphuism, in De vere argutis, opens with a tolerably confident note, “Nothing in our age is more preposterous than the running judgments upon poetry and poets,” with much more to the same effect, the whole being pointed by the fling, “If it were a question of the water-rhymer’s[275] works against Spenser’s, I doubt not but they would find more suffrages.” The famous passage on Shakespeare follows: and the development of Ben’s view, “would he had blotted a thousand,” leads to a more general disquisition on the differences of wits, which includes the sentence already referred to. “Such [i.e., haphazard and inconsistent] are all the Essayists, even their master Montaigne.” 202The notes now keep close to literature throughout in substance, though their titles (e.g., Ignorantia animæ), and so forth, may seem wider. A heading, De Claris Oratoribus (p. 26), leads to yet another of the purple passages of the book—that on Bacon, in which is intercalated a curious Scriptorum catalogus, limited, for the most part, though Surrey and Wyatt are mentioned, to prose writers. And then for some time ethics, politics, and other subjects, again have Ben’s chief attention.[276]

We return to literature, after some interval (but with a parenthetic glance at the poesis et pictura notion at p. 49), on p. 52, in a curious unheaded letter to an unnamed Lordship on Education, much of which is translated directly from Ben Jonson’s favourite Quintilian; and then directly accost it again with a tractatule De stilo et optimo scribendi genere, p. 54, hardly parting company thereafter. Ben’s prescription is threefold: read the best authors, observe the best speakers, and exercise your own style much. But he is well aware that no “precepts will profit a fool,” and he adapts old advice to English ingeniously, in bidding men read, not only Livy before Sallust, but also Sidney before Donne, and to beware of Chaucer or Gower at first. Here occurs the well-known dictum, that Spenser “in affecting the ancients writ no language; yet I would have him read for his matter.” A fine general head opens with the excellent version of Quintilian, “We should not protect our sloth with the patronage of Difficulty,” and this is followed by some shrewd remarks on diction—the shrewdest being that, after all, the best custom makes, and ever will continue to make, the best speech—with a sharp stroke at Lucretius for “scabrousness,” and at Chaucerisms. Brevity of style, Tacitean and other, is cautiously commended. In the phrase (Oratio imago animi), p. 64, “language most shows a man,” Ben seems to anticipate Buffon, as he later does Wordsworth and Coleridge, by insisting that style is not merely the dress, but the body of thought.[277] All this discussion, 203which enters into considerable detail, is of the first importance, and it occupies nearly a quarter of the whole book. It is continued, the continuation reaching till the end, by a separate discussion of poetry.

It is interesting, but less so than what comes before. A somewhat acid, though personally guarded, description of the present state of the Art introduces the stock definition of “making,” and its corollary that a poet is not one who writes in measure, but one who feigns—all as we have found it before, but (as we should expect of Ben) in succincter and more scholarly form. Yet the first requisite of the poet is ingenium—goodness of natural wit; the next exercise of his parts—“bringing all to the forge and file” (sculpte, lime, cisèle!); the third Imitation—to which Ben gives a turn (not exactly new, for we have met it from Vida downwards), which is not an improvement, by keeping its modern meaning, and understanding by it the following of the classics. “But that which we especially require in him is an exactness of study and multiplicity of reading.” Yet his liberty is not to be so narrowly circumscribed as some would have it. This leads to some interesting remarks on the ancient critics, which the author had evidently meant to extend: as it is, they break off short.[278] We turn to the Parts of comedy and tragedy, where Ben is strictly regular—the fable is the imitation of one entire and perfect action, &c. But this also breaks off, after a discussion of fable itself and episode, with an evidently quite disconnected fling at “hobbling poems which run like a brewer’s cart on the stones.”

These Discoveries have to be considered with a little general care before we examine them more particularly. Form of the book. They were, it has been said, never issued by the author himself, and we do not know whether he ever would have issued them in their present form. On the one hand, they are very carefully written, and not mere jottings. In form (though more modern in style) they resemble the earlier essays of that Bacon whom they so magnificently celebrate, in their 204deliberate conciseness and pregnancy. On the other hand, it is almost impossible to doubt that some at least were intended for expansion; it is difficult not to think that there was plenty more stuff of the same kind in the solidly constructed and well-stored treasuries of Ben’s intelligence and erudition. It is most difficult of all not to see that, in some cases, the thoughts are co-ordinated into regular tractates, in others left loose, as if for future treatment of the same kind.

Secondly, we should like to know rather more than we do of the time of their composition. Its date. Some of them—such as the retrospect of Bacon, and to a less degree that of Shakespeare—must be late; there is a strong probability that all date from the period between the fire in Ben’s study, which destroyed so much, and his death—say between 1620 and 1637. But at the same time there is nothing to prevent his having remembered and recopied observations of earlier date.

Thirdly, it is most important that we rightly understand the composition of the book. Mosaic of old and new. It has sometimes been discovered[279] in these Discoveries, with pride, or surprise, or even scorn, that Ben borrowed in them very largely from the ancients. Of course he did, as well as something, though less, from the Italian critics of the age immediately before his own.[280] But in neither case could he have hoped for a moment—and in neither is there the slightest reason to suppose that he would have wished if he could have hoped—to disguise his borrowings from a learned age. When a man—such as, for 205instance, Sterne—wishes to steal and escape, he goes to what nobody reads, not to what everybody is reading. And the Latins of the Silver Age, the two Senecas, Petronius, Quintilian, Pliny, were specially favourites with the Jacobean time. In what is going to be said no difference will be made between Ben’s borrowings and his original remarks: nor will the fact of the borrowing be referred to unless there is some special critical reason. Even the literal translations, which are not uncommon, are made his own by the nervous idiosyncrasy of the phrase, and its thorough adjustment to the context and to his own vigorous and massive temperament.

Of real “book-criticism” there are four chief passages, the brief flings at Montaigne and at “Tamerlanes and Tamerchams,” and the longer notices of Shakespeare and Bacon.

The flirt at “all the Essayists, even their master Montaigne,” is especially interesting, because of the high opinion which Jonson elsewhere expresses of Bacon, the chief, if not the first, English Essayist of his time, and because of the fact that not a few of these very Discoveries are “Essays,” if any things ever were. The fling at Montaigne; Nor would it be very easy to make out a clear distinction, in anything but name, between some of Ben’s most favourite ancient writers and these despised persons. It is, however, somewhat easier to understand the reason of the condemnation. Jonson’s classically ordered mind probably disliked the ostentatious desultoriness and incompleteness of the Essay, the refusal, as it were out of mere insolence, to undertake an orderly treatise. Nor is it quite impossible that he failed fully to understand Montaigne, and was to some extent the dupe of that great writer’s fanfaronade of promiscuousness.

The “Tamerlane and Tamercham[281] fling is not even at first sight surprising. at Tamerlane, It was quite certain that Ben would seriously despise what Shakespeare only laughed at—the confusion, 206the bombast, the want of order and scheme in the “University Wits”—and it is not probable that he was well enough acquainted with the even now obscure development of the earliest Elizabethan drama to appreciate the enormous improvement which they wrought. Nay, the nearer approach even of such a dull thing as Gorboduc to “the height of Seneca his style,” might have a little bribed him as it bribed Sidney. He is true to his side—to his division of the critical creed—in this also.

The train of thought—censure of the vulgar preference—runs clear from this to the best known passage of the whole, the section De Shakespeare Nostrat. the Shakespeare Passage, It cannot be necessary to quote it, or to point out that Ben’s eulogy, splendid as it is, acquires tenfold force from the fact that it is avowedly given by a man whose general literary theory is different from that of the subject, while the censure accompanying it loses force in exactly the same proportion. What Ben here blames, any ancient critic (perhaps even Longinus) would have blamed too: what Ben praises, it is not certain that any ancient critic, except Longinus, would have seen. Nor is the captious censure of “Cæsar did never wrong but with just cause” the least interesting part of the whole. The paradox is not in our present texts: and there have, of course, not been wanting commentators to accuse Jonson of garbling or of forgetfulness. This is quite commentatorially gratuitous and puerile. It is very like Shakespeare to have written what Ben says: very like Ben to object to the paradox (which, pace tanti viri, is not “ridiculous” at all, but a deliberate and effective hyperbole); very like the players to have changed the text; and most of all like the commentators to make a fuss about the matter.

What may seem the more unstinted eulogy of Bacon is not less interesting. and that on Bacon. For here it is obvious that Ben is speaking with fullest sympathy, and with all but a full acknowledgment of having met an ideal. Except the slight stroke, “when he could spare or pass by a jest,” and the gentle insinuation that Strength, the gift of God, was what 207Bacon’s friends had to implore for him, there is no admixture whatever in the eulogy of “him who hath filled up all numbers,[282] and performed that in our tongue which may be compared or preferred to insolent Greece or haughty Rome.” Indeed it could not have been—even if Ben Jonson had not been a friend, and, in a way, follower of Bacon—but that he should regard the Chancellor as his chief of literary men. Bacon, unluckily for himself, lacked the “unwedgeable and gnarled” strength of the dramatist, and also was without his poetic fire, just as Ben could never have soared to the vast, if vague, conceptions of Bacon’s materialist-Idealism. But they were both soaked in “literature,” as then understood; they were the two greatest masters of the closely packed style that says twenty things in ten words: and yet both could, on occasion, be almost as rhetorically imaginative as Donne or Greville. It is doubtful whether Bacon’s own scientific scorn for words without matter surpassed Jonson’s more literary contempt of the same phenomenon. Everywhere, or almost everywhere, there was between them the idem velle et idem nolle.

A limited précis, however, and a few remarks on special points, cannot do the Discoveries justice. The fragmentary character of the notes that compose it, the pregnant and deliberately “astringed” style in which these notes are written, so that they are themselves the bones, as it were, of a much larger treatise, defy such treatment. Yet it is full of value, as it gives us more than glimpses

“Of what a critic was in Jonson lost,”

or but piecemeal shown. We shall return, in the next chapter, to his relative position; but something should be said here of his intrinsic character.

208He does not, as must have been clearly seen, escape the “classical” limitation. General character of the book. With some ignorance, doubtless, and doubtless also some contempt, of the actual achievements of prose romance, and with that stubborn distrust of the modern tongues for miscellaneous prose purposes, which lasted till far into the seventeenth century, if it did not actually survive into the eighteenth, he still clings to the old mistakes about the identity of poetry and “fiction,” about the supremacy of oratory in prose. We hear nothing about the “new versifying,” though no doubt this would have been fully treated in his handling of Campion and Daniel: but had he had any approval for it, that approval must have been glanced at. His preference for the (stopped) couplet[283] foreshadowed that which, with beneficial effects in some ways, if by no means in all, was to influence the whole of English poetry, with the rarest exceptions, for nearly two centuries. The personal arrogance which, as in Wordsworth’s case, affected all Ben’s judgment of contemporaries, and which is almost too fully reflected in the Drummond Conversations, would probably have made even his more deliberate judgments of these—his judgments “for publication”—inadequate. But it is fair to remember that Ben’s theory (if not entirely his practice, especially in his exquisite lyrics and almost equally exquisite masques) constrained him to be severe to those contemporaries, from Spenser, Shakespeare, and Donne downwards. The mission of the generation may be summed up in the three words, Liberty, Variety, Romance. Jonson’s tastes were for Order, Uniformity, Classicism.

He is thus doubly interesting—interesting as putting both with sounder scholarship and more original wit what men from Ascham to Puttenham, and later, had been trying to say before him, in the sense of adapting classical precepts to English: and far more interesting as adumbrating, beforehand, the creed of Dryden, and Pope, and Samuel Johnson. Many of his individual judgments are as shrewd as they are one-sided; they are always well, and sometimes admirably, expressed, in a 209style which unites something of Elizabethan colour, and much of Jacobean weight, with not a little of Augustan simplicity and proportion. He does not head the line of English critics; but he heads, and worthily, that of English critics who have been great both in criticism and in creation.[284]


198. The two chief monographs on this are Spingarn, op. cit., in the division appurtenant (pp. 253-310), and Professor F. E. Schelling, Poetic and Verse Criticism of the Reign of Elizabeth, Philadelphia, 1891. Haslewood reprinted most of the texts together in Ancient Critical Essays, 2 vols., London, 1811-15, and Mr Arber the most important separately in his English Reprints. Mr Gregory Smith is now editing, for the Clarendon Press, the fullest collection yet issued.

199. Such as those on the “fair language of France,” and the strictures passed by Margaret of England and Burgundy on the “default in mine English” (History of Troy); on the “right good and fair English” of Lord Rivers (Dicts and Sayings of the Philosophers).

200. There has been some disposition to deny this, and to argue that despite the constant use of the word Rhetoric in the fifteenth century, the teaching of the thing had declined. I do not think there is much evidence of this as regards England; and the long and curious passage of Hawes, to be presently discussed, is strong evidence against it. Rhetoric has no less than eight chapters of the Pastime of Pleasure, as against one apiece for Grammar and Logic.

201. The Pastime of Pleasure, ed. Wright (Percy Society, London, 1845), pp. 27-56.

202. This Fourth River will appear a less startling “novelty” when the illuminating power attributed to the stone is remembered.

203. Wilson has usually been dignified in this way: but some authorities, including the Dict. Nat. Biog., deny him knighthood.

204. It was not actually the first in English, Leonard Coxe having preceded him “about 1524” with an English adaptation, apparently, of Melanchthon. But this is of no critical importance.

205. My copy is of this, which is the fuller.

206. Fol. 82.

207. Fol. 1, verso, at bottom.

208. One may regret “sparple” and “disparple,” which are good and picturesque Englishings of e(s)parpiller. The forms “sparkle” and “disparkle,” which seem to have been commoner, are no loss, as being equivocal.

209. Not that the phrase is of his invention. It seems to have been a catchword of the time, and occurs in Bale (1543), in Peter Ashton’s version of Jovius (1546), &c.

210. Of course Cheke had in his mind the passage of Quintilian concerning Julius Florus (v. supra, i. 313).

211. Ed. Arber, pp. 154-159.

212. This may be found in Arber’s Introduction to the book just cited, p. 5; or in Professor Raleigh’s ed. of Hoby (London, 1900), pp. 12, 13.

213. For these two books Mr Arber’s excellent reprints can hardly be bettered. But for our purposes the Letters are also needed; and these, with other things, will be found in Giles’s edition of the Works, 3 vols. in 4, London, 1864-65.

214. Quid omnes Oxonienses sequuntur plane nescio, sed ante aliquot menses in Aula incidi in quendam illius Academiæ, qui nimium præferendo Lucianum, Plutarchum et Herodianum, Senecam, A. Gellium, et Apuleium utramque linguam in nimis senescentem et effœtam ætatem compingere mihi videbatur—Giles, i. 190. The whole letter (to Sturm) is worth reading.

215. P. 19, ed. Arber. The passage contains a stroke at monasticism.

216. P. 80, ed. Arber.

217. Thought to be his last, and written in Dec. 1568; ed. Giles, ii. 189. The correspondence with Sturm is, as we should expect, particularly literary.

218. V. supra, p. 46.

219. V. supra, p. 127.

220. There had, of course, been some charming jets of folk-song in ballad, carol, and what not.

221. It is curious that, in this very début of English criticism, the incivility with which critics are constantly and too justly charged makes its appearance. Ascham would seem to have been a good-natured soul enough. Yet he abuses rhyme and its partisans in the true “Père Duchêne” style which some critics still affect. “To follow the Goths in rhyming instead of the Greeks in versifying” is “to eat acorns with swine, when we may eat wheat bread among men.” Rhymers are “a rude multitude,” “rash, ignorant heads,” “wandering blindly in their foul wrong way,” &c.

222. Schoolmaster, ed. cit., p. 73. Ascham actually quotes the Greek and the Latin of Homer and Horace, and declares Watson’s stuff to be made as “naturally” as the one and as “aptly” as the other!

223. Ibid., p. 145.

224. P. 147. The extraordinary confusion of mind of the time is illustrated by Ascham’s sheltering himself behind Quintilian!

225. Not to be confounded with Thomas Watson, the author of the Hecatompathia, who came later, and was an Oxford man.

226. Some authorities have been much too mild towards it. For instance, the late Mr Henry Morley, who says, “Thomas Drant, of course, did not suppose that his rules were sufficient.” This is charitable, but outside, or rather against, the evidence.

227. Certain Notes of Instruction concerning the making of verse or rhyme in English, ed. Arber (with The Steel Glass, &c.), pp. 31-41, London, 1868. Originally in the 4to edition of Gascoigne’s Poems (London, 1575). Mr Spingarn sees indebtedness in it to Ronsard.

228. The observations of Ascham, Wilson, and the others being incidental merely.

229. “If I should undertake to write in praise of a gentlewoman, I would neither praise her crystal eye nor her cherry lip.”

230. Gascoigne does not use this division, or ¯ and ˘ but ´ and ` for long and short, ~ (circumflex) for common, and indented lines (dissyllabic and trisyllabic) for dissyllabic and trisyllabic foot arrangements.

231. “For the haughty obscure verse doth not much delight, and the verse that is too easy is like a tale of a roasted horse.”

232. See Mitford, Harmony of Language, p. 105, who thinks the licence just the other way, and indeed roundly pronounces the pronunciation in one syllable “impossible.” A little later, again, Guest thinks the dis-syllable “uncouth and vulgar.” A most documentary disagreement!

233. See Grosart’s Works of Gabriel Harvey, vol. i. pp. 6-150. Parts will be found in the Globe edition of Spenser, pp. 706-710.

234. I am not responsible for the eccentricities of this form.

235. In order of composition, not of publication.

236. This word, which is certainly a cousin of “balderdash,” is a good example of the slang and jargon so often mixed with their preciousness by the Elizabethans. Nash borrowed it from Harvey to use against him; and the eccentric Stanyhurst even employs it in his Virgil. Stanyhurst’s hexameters, by the way (vide Mr Arber’s Reprint in the English Scholars Library, No. 10, London, 1880), are, thanks partly to their astounding lingo, among the maddest things in English literature; but his prose prefatory matter, equally odd in phrase, has some method in its madness.

237. La Casa’s book of etiquette and behaviour.

238. The further letters to Spenser, which Dr Grosart has borrowed from the Camden Society’s Letter-book of Gabriel Harvey, touch literary matters not seldom, but with no new important deliverances. In the later (1592) Four Letters, the embroidery of railing at the dead Greene and the living Nash has almost entirely hidden the literary canvas.

239. Reprinted by Mr Arber, with its almost immediately subsequent Apology. I wish he had added the Ephemerides of Phialo which accompanied the Apology, and the Plays Confuted of three years later; for these books—very small and very difficult of access—add something to the controversy.

240. Several times reprinted; most recently by the present writer in Elizabethan and Jacobean Pamphlets (London, 1892).

241. Also frequently (indeed oftener) reprinted as by Arber, London, 1868; Shuckburgh, Cambridge, 1891; Cook, Boston (U.S.A.), 1890.

242. V. supra, p. 28.

243. Our two chief English-writing authorities, Mr Symonds and Mr Spingarn, are at odds as to Sidney’s indebtedness to the Italians. He quotes them but sparingly—Petrarch, Boccaccio, Landino, among the older writers, Fracastoro and Scaliger alone, I think, of the moderns—and Mr Symonds thought that he owed them little or nothing. Mr Spingarn, on the other hand, represents him as following them all in general, and Minturno in particular. As usual, it is a case of the gold and silver shield. My own reading of the Italian writers of 1530-80 leaves me in no doubt that Sidney knew them, or some of them, pretty well. But his attitude is very different from theirs as a whole, and already significant of some specially English characteristics in criticism.

244. Savonarola, v. sup., p. 20.

245. “I must confess my own barbarousness: I never heard the old song of Percy and Douglas that I found not my heart moved more than with a trumpet.”

246. “As indeed it seemeth Scaliger judgeth.”

247. It may be desirable to note that Sidney’s book, though very well known, as was the wont then, in MS., to all who cared to know, was never printed till 1595, nearly ten years after the author’s death.

248. All three are included in Mr. Arber’s Reprints, where the desirable, or desired, biographical and bibliographical apparatus will be duly found.

249. It is, however, excessive to represent James as a mere copyist of Gascoigne.

250. Who also caught at James’s “tumbling verse” as a convenient stigmatisation for the true English equivalenced liberty.

251. Occleve—no genius, but a true man enough—deserves exception perhaps best.

252. The Germans—in this, as in other matters, more hopelessly to seek in English now than, teste Porson, they were a century ago in Greek—have followed Webbe, as indeed Warton had strangely done; and of course some Englishmen have followed the Germans. Lydgate himself knew better, though some of the shorter poems attributed to him are metrically, as well as in other ways, not contemptible.

253. V. infra, p. 354.

254. The whole of the documents in the case will be found, clearly put, in Mr Arber’s Introduction. The first attribution is in Bolton (v. infra) some fifteen years later than the date of the book, and not quite positive (“as the Fame is”). But there is no other claimant who has anything to put in: and the almost diseased aversion of “persons of quality” (Puttenham was possibly a nephew of Sir Thomas Elyot’s, and a Gentleman-Pensioner of the Queen’s) to avowing authorship is well known.

255. Harington, a person of humour, and a typical Englishman, perstringes this as well as other things in his fling at the Art.

256. Here as elsewhere we may note evidences of possible revision in the book. That there was some such revision is certain; for instance, Ben Jonson’s copy (the existence of which is not uninteresting) contains a large cancel of four leaves, not found in other copies known. For this and other points of the same kind, see Mr Arber’s edition.

257. “Reviewing” was as yet in its infancy—a curiously lively one though, with Nash and others coming on. Puttenham seems to have understood its little ways rather well.

258. Reprinted by Haslewood. Whetstone’s Preface to Promos and Cassandra (1578) and A. Fraunce’s Arcadian Rhetoric (1588) are earlier still. The former anticipates Sidney in objecting to the irregularity of English plays: the latter is a strong partisan of classical metres, his practice in which is sufficiently roughly treated by Ben Jonson in his Conversations, v. infra, p. 199.

259. Reprinted (in its critical section) by Mr Arber, English Garner, ii. 94 sq.

260. Bolton’s criticism of his contemporaries is extracted in Warton (iv. 204 sq., ed. Hazlitt). The writer, who is dealing with History, and speaking directly of language, disallows most of Spenser (excepting the Hymns) and all Chaucer, Lydgate, Langland, and Skelton, can “endure” Gascoigne, praises Elizabeth and James (of course), Chapman, Daniel, Drayton, Constable, Southwell, Sackville, Surrey, Wyatt, Raleigh, Donne, and Greville, but gives the palm for “vital, judicious, and practicable” language to Jonson.

261. Ed. Bullen, Works of Dr Thomas Campion, London, 1889.

262. Chalmers’s Poets, iii. 551-560; Grosart’s Works of Samuel Daniel, iv. 29-67.

263. It ought to be, but from certain signs perhaps is not, unnecessary to say that the De Augmentis is itself no mere Latin version of the Advancement, but a large expansion of it. There seems, however, no necessity here to deal with both.

264. Advancement of Learning, Bk. II. iv.

265. I have more than once said that controversy or polemic in detail with other writers is forbidden here. But those who wish to see what has been said for Bacon will find most of the references in Messrs Gayley and Scott’s invaluable book. The panegyrists—from my honoured friend and predecessor, Professor Masson, to Mr Worsfold—all rely on the description of poetry above referred to, as “Feigned History,” with what follows on its advantages and on poetical justice, &c. All this seems to me, however admirably expressed, to be obvious and rudimentary to the xth and the nth.

266. To be most readily found in Rogers’s Memorials of the Earl of Stirling (vol. ii. pp. 205-210; Edinburgh, 1877), where, however, it appears merely as one of the Appendices to a book of more or less pure genealogy, without the slightest editorial information as to date or provenance. It seems to be taken from the 1711 folio of Drummond’s Works: and to have been written in 1634, between Bacon’s death and Ben’s.

267. From Park, and from Messrs Gayley and Scott. I did not always agree with my late friend Dr Grosart: but I think he was better advised when he called it “disappointing.”

268. It may be well to point out that these days carried him far beyond the point at which we have stopped for Italian and for French. His solidarity with the Elizabethans proper, however, makes his inclusion here imperative: and the fact must be taken into consideration in judging the relative lengths of this and the preceding chapters.

269. Take as one of a hundred, and from the less read pieces, that interesting passage in the masque of The New World Discovered in the Moon, which Gifford has made more interesting by a further discovery in Theobald’s copy:—

Chro. Is he a man’s poet or a woman’s poet, I pray you?you?

2nd Her. Is there any such difference?

Fact. Many, as betwixt your man’s tailor and your woman’s tailor.

1st Her. How, may we beseech you?

Fact. I’ll show you: your man’s poet may break out strong and deep i' the mouth, ... but your woman’s poet must flow, and stroke the ear, and as one of them said of himself sweetly—

“Must write a verse as smooth and calm as cream,
In which there is no torrent, nor scarce stream.”

Whereon the injured “Tibbalds”: “Woman’s Poet, his soft versification—Mr P——.”

The Induction to Every Man out of His Humour, a very large part of Cynthia’s Revels, with its principal character of Crites, and its audacious self-praise in the Epilogue, not a little of The Silent Woman, and scores of other places in play and poem, might be added.

270. These dicta, thus juxtaposed, should make all argument about apparently one-sided judgments superfluous. If Drummond had omitted the first or the last, we should have been utterly wrong in arguing from the remainder.

271. The best separate edition is that of Prof. Schelling of Philadelphia (Boston, U.S.A., 1892). I give the pp. of this, as well as the Latin Headings of sections, which will enable any one to trace the passage in complete editions of the Works such as Cunningham’s Gifford. It is strange that no one has numbered these sections for convenience of reference.

272. It may be observed that the shorter aphorisms rise to the top—at least the beginning.

273. “He is upbraidingly called a poet.... The professors, indeed, have made the learning cheap.”

274. It is here that Ben borrows from Petronius not merely the sentiment but the phrase, “umbratical doctor” (see vol. i. p. 244 note).

275. “Taylor the Water-Poet,” certainly bad enough as a poet—though not as a man. But the selection of Spenser as the other pole is an invaluable correction to the sweeping attack in the Conversations.

276. Perhaps, indeed, an exception should be made in favour of the section De malignitate Studentium, p. 34, which reiterates the necessity of “the exact knowledge of all virtues and their contraries” on the part of the poet.

277. He may have taken this from the Italians.

278. This is one of the most lacrimable of the gaps. Ben must have known other authorities besides Quintilian well: he even quotes, though only in part, the great passage of Simylus (vol. i. p. 25 note).

279. I am most anxious not to be thought to reflect on Professor Schelling in this remark. Dr Schelling’s indagations of Ben’s debts are most interesting, and always made in the right spirit, while, like a good farmer and sportsman, he has left plenty for those who come after him to glean and bag. For instance, the very curious passage, taken verbatim from the elder Seneca, about the Platonic Apology (cf. vol. i. p. 237).

280. Yet in re-reading Jonson, just after a pretty elaborate overhauling of the Italians, I find very little certain indebtedness of detail. Mr Spingarn seems to me to go too far in tracing, p. 88, “small Latin and less Greek” to Minturno’s “small Latin and very small Greek,” and the distinction of poeta, poema, poesis to Scaliger or Maggi. Fifty people might have independently thought of the first; and the second is an application of a “common form” nearly as old as rhetoric.

281. P. 27. “The Tamerlanes and Tamerchams of the late age, which had nothing in them but the scenical strutting and furious vociferation to warrant them.” It is just worth noting that Jonson thought there was more than this in Marlowe; and that the early edd. of Tamburlaine are anonymous.

282. One cannot but remember—with pity or glee, according to mood and temperament—how the Bacon-Shakespeare-maniacs have actually taken this in the sense of poetic “numbers.” But in truth their study is not likely to be much in haughty Rome and its language, or to have led them either to Petronius and his omnium nume[ro]rum, or to Seneca and his insolenti Græciæ.

283. Daniel had frankly defended enjambement.

284. It seemed unnecessary to enlarge the space given to the men of Eliza and our James, by including the merer grammarians and pedagogues, from Mulcaster to that fervid Scot, Mr Hume, who, in 1617, extolled the “Orthography and Congruity” of his native speech (ed. Wheatley, E.E.T.S., 1865). Of Mulcaster, however, it deserves to be mentioned that, not so much in his Positions (1581: ed. Quick, London, 1887), which have been, as in his Elementarie, which should be, reprinted, he displays a more than Pléiade enthusiasm for the vernacular. Unluckily this last is not easy of access, even the B.M. copy being a “Grenville” book, and hedged round with forms and fears.

211

INTERCHAPTER IV.

The proper appreciation of the period surveyed in the foregoing Book is of perhaps greater importance than that of any other part of this History. We have seen, in the three preceding Interchapters, what it was that prevented Greek, Roman, and Mediæval criticism respectively from attaining completeness, and how the preventives worked. We saw further, in the last pages of the First Volume, in what condition literature, and at least the possibilities of the criticism of literature, were left at the beginning of the Renaissance. And now we have seen what additions the Renaissance made—not, indeed, in detail, to literature itself, for that belongs to another story than ours, but what additions it made—to the criticism of literature. In mere bulk these additions were very considerable. The extant critical writing of these hundred years (or rather of the last seventy of them), excluding mere rhetorical schoolbooks, probably exceeds, and very largely exceeds, the total of classical and mediæval work on the subject which we possess, even inclusive of schoolbooks. For the very first time Criticism, not as a sort of half accidental and more than half shame-faced extension of Rhetoric, but in and for itself, received a really large share of the intellectual attention of the period.

Moreover, the advantages possessed by Renaissance critics (as we partly also saw in the place referred to) were likewise very great. Men were beginning really to know and really to understand antiquity; they had the whole body of mediæval literature complete, finished, ready for their appreciation; and they or their contemporaries were daily and yearly building up great literatures in all the principal countries of Europe, except 212Germany, and not wholly despicable literatures there and elsewhere. The excuse of the want of comparison, which had been valid for Greece, less valid but still partly so for Rome, and valid again, though for different reasons, in the Middle Ages, was dwindling and disappearing every day. There was no want of interest in the subject; there was no want of examples, both encouraging and warning, of method.

Nor is it possible to deny that the actual accomplishment of the time was very considerable likewise. When a century finds a certain department of intellectual activity almost uncultivated; when it leaves that subject in a state of active cultivation; and when, further, two following centuries are content to opine almost wholly in the sense to which it has generally inclined,—that century can hardly be said to have wasted its years. Accomplishment—very remarkable and solid accomplishment—it can certainly boast. It must be the business of this Interchapter to examine the nature and (partly at least) the value of that accomplishment, now that we have fully surveyed its items, and frankly admitted a certain general result.

In considering the critical achievement of Italy, the earliest in time, the most abundant in result, the most influential—in fact an abridgment, and no mean abridgment, of that of Europe—we cannot but see at once that there was a certain disadvantage accompanying the inevitableness and the general propriety of this Italian prerogative. No other country had so much learning; but, for this very reason, no other country was so certain rather to over- than to under-value the importance of ancient doctrine. No country had so perfect a literature, though other countries had literatures older, richer, and more vigorous; but this very perfection, while it might seem to provide a fertile field for criticism, had two dangers. The Italians were likely to look down upon, or simply to ignore, other literatures; and, from the failing, though slowly and not conspicuously failing, force of their creative power, they were likely to turn to logomachies and debating-society wrangles. Nay, there was a third peril. No country had so little properly mediæval literature as Italy; and none therefore was more certain to set the fashion of ignoring or slighting that mediæval performance 213which is so invaluable as a check and balance-redresser. And perhaps we might even add a fourth—that while French and English had got practically beyond the reach of mere dialect-jealousy, Italian had not; and that too much of the abundant interest in literature was throughout turned upon mere grammar and mere linguistics.

Perhaps for these reasons, perhaps for others, perhaps for none assignable except by superfluous guess-work, Italian criticism, active and voluminous as it was, settled very early into certain well-marked limits and channels, and almost wholly confined itself within them, though these channels underwent no infrequent intersection or confluence.

The main texts and patterns of the critics of the Italian Renaissance were three—the Ars Poetica of Horace, the Poetics of Aristotle, and the various Platonic places dealing with poetry. These latter had, as we have seen, begun to affect Italian thought, directly or by transmission through this or that medium, before the close of the fourteenth century; and the maintenance of the Platonic ban, the refutation of it, or the more or less ingenious acceptance and evasion of it, with the help of the Platonic blessing, had been a tolerably familiar exercise from the time of Boccaccio to the time of Savonarola. But Horace and Aristotle gave rules and patterns of much more definiteness. Of the writers of the abundant critical literature which has been partly surveyed, some directly comment these texts; others follow them with more or less selection or combination; many take up separate questions suggested by them; very few, if any, face the subject without some prepossession derived from them.

The very earliest regular criticism, as in Vida and the first books of Trissino, is either strictly grammatical and formal or else tends to expatiate further in the Horatian path of rather desultory practical hints for composition, these latter usually tending towards a more or less slavish “Follow the ancients.” But, from the time of Daniello onwards, more abstract views and questionings, especially in the direction of a sort of Eirenicon between Aristotle and Plato, begin to engage the attention of critics, sometimes as a prelude to study of formal Poetics, 214sometimes to the exclusion of this. The most thoroughgoing as well as about the ablest example of this latter kind is probably the Naugerius of Fracastoro, where this distinguished physician and physicist, himself a skilled versifier and even something of a poet, scarcely touches poets and poetry in the concrete more than he might in a dialogue on physics or metaphysics, and is entirely occupied with questions of the extremest “metapoetic,” or metacriticism.

This kind of discussion, which is prominent in the whole body of critics from Daniello to Summo, is, with its extensions in the direction of the Theory of the Drama, the Theory of the Heroic Poem, &c., no doubt the most characteristic, and perhaps even the constitutive, feature of Italian criticism. It seems to have been that which most attracted foreign scholars, and stirred them up to emulation; it is very rarely omitted altogether by anybody, save the merest grammarians. In fact, it so impressed itself, during this period, upon the imagination, the memory, the intellectual habit, not merely of Italy but of Europe, that to this day critics who neglect it are looked at askance by many, if not by most, of their fellows.

Questions, however, more practical than these, yet not of quite such extreme practicality as the mere questions of grammar and dialect, of metric and composition, did actually occupy the Italians. About the middle of the century the lucubrations of Cinthio and Pigna on the question of the Romances and their relation to Epic and to the Aristotelian system, opened up the most promising prospect by far that had ever yet been disclosed to criticism. Had these inquiries been followed up—had they been extended from the Romance to the novella, which had already become such a feature of Italian vernacular literature—had Italy provided something not less vigorous, but more polished, than the English Interlude and romantic mystery of the Mary Magdalene type, or the French farce and sotie, so that a similar investigation might have been further extended to drama—there is no saying what might not have been achieved. But this was not permitted.

As a matter of fact, the times were not ready, nor the circumstances. The profitable promise of the discussion on 215the romanzi dwindled off into the mere logomachies or personalities of the Gerusalemme controversy, and into endless formula-making for the abstract Heroic Poem. But little trace of it is seen on the vigorous and independent mind of Castelvetro; less on the equally vigorous, still more independent, but perhaps rather more scholastic, mind of Patrizzi. For the former, Aristotle is still the special though not quite the exclusive battleground, or canvas, or whatever metaphor may be preferred; and he labours—as all these Italians do, in strange apparent, though perhaps not real, contrast to the vagueness and far-reaching sweep of their more abstract inquiries—under a difficulty, under a seeming impossibility, of getting beyond disjointed observations and comments on Aristotle, Homer, Dante, Petrarch, into a fruitful and satisfying critical study of any poem or poet. Scaliger drills the whole mob of formal and theoretical particulars into an orderly regiment, indulges in plentiful criticism of the verbal and occasional kind, attempts to take a (for him) complete historic survey, and achieves at least a quasi-tiebeam, a bastard unity, for his work by his all-pervading, uncompromising Virgil-worship, which gives a test for everything, an answer for everything, a standard always at hand. Patrizzi seems, with his double method of historical survey and argumentative inquiry, to have at last unbarred the very gates of the true path. But he does not proceed far along it; and astonishingly sound as well as original as are many of his conclusions, he hardly attempts to apply them to modern poetry, except in the Trimerone, where he is too much entangled in the special quibbles and squabbles of the controversy to which it belongs. All the rest—even interesting people like Minturno—sometimes peep over the wall, yet confine their actual walk within it.

Between all the schools, and from among the welter of the individuals, there arises, in the mysterious way in which such things do arise, and which defies all but shallow and superficial explanation, a sort of general critical creed, every particular article of which would probably have been signed by no two particular persons—perhaps by no one—but which is ready to become, and in the next century does become, orthodox and 216accepted as a whole. And this creed runs somewhat as follows:—

On the higher and more abstract questions of poetry (which are by no means to be neglected) Aristotle is the guide; but the meaning of Aristotle is not always self-evident even so far as it goes, and it sometimes requires supplementing. Poetry is the imitation of nature: but this imitation may be carried on either by copying nature as it is or by inventing things which do not actually exist, and have never actually existed, but which conduct themselves according to the laws of nature and reason. The poet is not a public nuisance, but quite the contrary. He must, however, both delight and instruct.

As for the Kinds of poetry, they are not mere working classifications of the practice of poets, but have technically constituting definitions from which they might be independently developed, and according to which they ought to be composed. The general laws of Tragedy are given by Aristotle; but it is necessary to extend his prescription of Unity so as to enjoin three species—of Action, Time, and Place. Tragedy must be written in verse, which, though not exactly the constituting form of poetry generally, is almost or quite inseparable from it. The illegitimacy of prose in Comedy is less positive. Certain extensions of the rules of the older Epic may be admitted, so as to constitute a new Epic or Heroic Poem; but it is questionable whether this may have the full liberty of Romance, and it is subject to Unity, though not to the dramatic Unity. Other Kinds are inferior to these.

In practising them, and in practising all, the poet is to look first, midmost, and last to the practice of the ancients. “The ancients” may even occasionally be contracted to little more than Virgil; they may be extended to take in Homer, or may be construed much more widely. But taking things on the whole, “the ancients” have anticipated almost everything, and in everything that they have anticipated have done so well that the best chance of success is simply to imitate them. The detailed precepts 217of Horace are never to be neglected; if supplemented, they must be supplemented in the same sense.

It is less the business of the historian, after drawing up this creed, to criticise it favourably or unfavourably, than to point out that it had actually, by the year 1600, come very near to formulated existence. We shall find it in actual formulation in the ensuing book; we have already seen it in more than adumbration, governing the pronouncements of a scholar and a man of genius like Ben Jonson thirty years later than the close of the sixteenth century. A full estimate of its merits and demerits must be postponed to the close of this volume. But it may be observed at once that it is, prima facie, not a perfect creed by any means. It has (and this, I think, has been too seldom noticed) a fault, almost, if not quite, as great on the a priori side as that which it confessedly has on the a posteriori. It does not face the facts; it blinks all mediæval and a great deal of existing modern literature. But, then, to do it justice, it does not pretend to do other than blink them. The fault in its own more special province is much more glaring, though, as has been said, it has, by a sort of sympathy, been much more ignored. There is no real connection between the higher and the lower principles of Neo-Classicism. There is not merely one crevasse, not easily to be crossed, in this glacier of Correctness; there are two or three. Let us, for argument’s sake, concede all the points in Fracastoro’s Naugerius, the Aconcagua or Everest of the school. Let us allow that to the real lover of poetry it skills not much whether he grants or denies all its propositions. But how are we to pass from these to the further group—to allow that Reason, Common-Sense, Nature, will govern the poet’s mediate and lower necessities? How from this, again, to the still other group of dramatic, heroic, miscellaneous requirements of the Correct? How from any of them to the entirely arbitrary warning clause that the ancients have actually or virtually anticipated everything?

On the more obvious faults of Italian criticism in detail—its extravagant Virgil-worship; its refusal (except in such rare and 218practically isolated cases as Lilius Giraldus’ knowledge of Chaucer and Wyatt, Patrizzi’s of Fauchet and his Old French subjects) to take any account of foreign modern literature; its coterie-squabbling and the rest, it would not be profitable to dwell much. But it is curious and instructive to notice how little appreciative criticism of contemporaries this active critical period gives. If you start a controversy of an ancient against a modern or a modern against a modern—of Homer against Ariosto, or of Ariosto against Tasso—there will be plenty of persons to take a hand. For a really appreciative study of any writer, modern or ancient, I do not know where to look. Men are so besotted, on the one hand, with their inquiries into general principles; on the other, with their sporadic annotations, that they cannot attempt anything of the kind.

Yet it would be an act of the grossest injustice and ingratitude to refuse or to stint recognition of the immense services that the Italians rendered to criticism at this time. It was, in their own stately word, a veritable case of risorgimento; and of resurrection in a body far better organised, far more gifted, than that which had gone to sleep a thousand years before.

In the year 1500 we may look over Europe and find criticism really alive and awake nusquam et nullibi—at best fast asleep, and dreaming a little with the dreams of Gavin Douglas or (had he lived a couple of years longer) of Savonarola, or of such more infantine persons as Augustine Käsenbrot. In 1600 criticism is a classed and recognised department of literature; Faustino Summo, in the very year, can quote authority after authority, refer—as to a sort of common law of the subject—to dicta and obiter dicta of nearly three generations of distinguished judges. And Italian criticism has colonised: its colonies, with the virtues of that kind, are showing characteristics sometimes quite different, though derived from those of the mother country, and are carrying the critical torch round the world. No matter for the moment whether the more perfect way has been reached, or the less perfect way declined upon. The time of “liking grossly,” of composing anyhow, has passed: that of critical study of the old, and critical reception of the new, has begun.

Never, therefore, shall I join in the anathema in which De 219Quincey[285] has coupled Italian critics with Greek rhetoricians. In fact, the Italians suffer far more unjustly than the Greeks. Castelvetro and Patrizzi alone would be enough to clear their company handsomely: Capriano, Cinthio Giraldi, Minturno could put in quite sufficient bail on their own recognisances: yet others would leave the court more than recommended to mercy.[286] I disagree with many of the principles of most of them; I wish that even those with whom I agree had opened their eyes wider, kept them more steadily on the object, and cared less about fighting abstract prizes, and more about appreciating the goods which the gods had given them in concrete literature. It was also a misfortune, no doubt, that no man of very distinct genius and whole-hearted devotion gave himself up to the business. Vida was a good kind of pedant, and Trissino at heart a philologist; Daniello, Capriano, and most of the rest, including even Minturno, down to Denores and Summo, persons of respectable talent merely; Fracastoro, a man of science; Cinthio, a novelist and miscellanist; Scaliger, a not quite so good kind of more deeply-dyed pedant; Castelvetro, a scholar, with the scholar’s quarrelsomeness; Patrizzi, a philosopher primarily; Torquato Tasso himself, a great poet, with, for a poet, a sensible and logical but curiously timid and hesitating mind. Not a few of them did great things for Criticism; all together they did a really mighty thing for her and for Literature: but they were not her sworn servants, as Lessing and Hazlitt, as Sainte-Beuve and Arnold, were later.

Let there be to them not the less but almost the more glory! It is something—nay, it is very much—to have created a Kind. Up to their time Criticism had been a mere Cinderella in the literary household. Aristotle had taken her up as he had taken all Arts and Sciences. The Rhetoricians had found her a useful handmaid to Rhetoric. Roman dilettanti had dallied with her. The solid good sense and good feeling of Quintilian had decided that she must be “no casual mistress but a wife” 220(perhaps on rather polygamic principles) to the student of oratory. Longinus had suddenly fixed her colours on his helmet, and had ridden in her honour the most astonishing little chevauchée in the annals of adventurous literature. The second greatest poet of the world had done her at once yeoman’s service and stately courtesy. And yet she was, in the general literary view, not so much déclassée as not classed at all—not “out,” not accorded the entrées.

This was now all over. The country which gave the literary tone and set the literary fashions of Europe had adopted Criticism in the most unmistakable manner—whether in the manner wisest or most perfect is not for the present essential. Rank thus given is never lost; at any rate, there is no recorded instance of a literary attainder for Kinds, whatever there may be for persons.

When this criticism passes the Alps, and we pass them with it, a curious difference is to be perceived. We leave the abstract side of the matter almost wholly behind us—the most abstract side perhaps wholly. A little of the Platonic generalities, relieved from the Platonic detraction, may be indulged in pro forma, and Vauquelin (in that odd familiarityfamiliarity with Deity which the French have always displayed) may image God as a gardener ordering the garden of Poesy with trim walks, and neatly planted beds, and hedges, which must not be trespassed on, or from, or through. But the French attention almost wholly deserts such things for the mediate generalities of kind and form; and is constantly tempted to desert these also for the still lower and more particular questions of language, prosody, and style. The fact is, that the circumstances have entirely changed. The Italians, though they may not know it, are in a state of declining vitality and creative force as regards actual literature; even Tasso is an “old man’s child” among their greatest. Besides, to do them justice, there is very little left for them to do with their mere means of language and the like. It is quite different with French and Frenchmen. If they are rashly neglectful (and Fauchet, Pasquier, and others are soon on the spot to vindicate them to some extent from 221this neglect) of their further past, there is some excuse for impatience of the past that is nearer; and it is even natural and human, though far from praiseworthy, that they should scorn the once charming formal devices which latterly, in most hands, have been so destitute of charm. But make allowance as we may for the causes, the facts remain. French criticism is much the least important of the three divisions which we have considered in the foregoing book. Not only does it begin late; not only does it fail to be very fertile; but its individual documents require a certain kindness to speak very highly of their virtues, and a good deal of blindness to conceal their shortcomings. I have protested above against a too low estimate of the critical value of the Défense et Illustration. Its critical interest is really great, and its critical importance really high; but this greatness and this importance are scarcely absolute. They belong to it as to one of our very first pieces of revolutionary criticism—one of the first in which the newly hatched and fledged critical spirit of Europe shows itself of falcon breed, and sets out to fight and destroy as well as to build nests and hatch young in its turn. The censure of the Défense is very mainly unjust, and its positive doctrine, though generous, and, in the circumstances, not insalutary, is vague, not very far-sighted, and, at the very best, extremely incomplete. What saves it is, first, the abundant and conclusive evidence that it gives of the critic being actually abroad in earnest, of the time of mere acquiescence and tradition having ceased, of there being writers who are determined to attack some kinds of writing and encourage others with their very best will and power; and, secondly, the generous and uncompromising championship of the vernacular, which is the greatest glory of the Pléiade, and which, followed in other countries, gave us the great modern literatures. Du Bellay has the credit of bringing criticism, if we may so speak, nearer to her true object than almost any Italian critic of his own century had done, though he does not himself either practise or prescribe the best way of getting at that object.

The criticism of his colleague, or master, Ronsard, is, as we have seen, injured by its small bulk, by its rather fragmentary 222character, by the fact that the most considerable piece of it has passed through another hand, and that we have only that hand’s own testimony for the faithfulness of the rehandling, and by not a little decided inconsistency. But it has the same militant, practical spirit as Du Bellay’s in quality, and more of it in proportional quantity. Moreover, it is extremely germinal. Those[287] who contend that the classical French criticism of the seventeenth century was only the Pléiade criticism of the sixteenth, denying its masters, omitting some, if not always the worst, parts of their creed, narrowed in range, and perfected in apparent system, have a great deal to say for themselves. Nor can there be reasonable doubt that, though Du Bellay was the first to speak critically, the teaching was the teaching of Ronsard throughout. Of this teaching, the injunction to enrich the language by archaism, and dialect, and word-coining (even by reading the forgotten romances of Arthur), was the very best part, and the first to be discarded by the ingratitude of the rebellious disciples, Malherbe and those about him. The worst part, which was not discarded but retained, was the adoption of the Italian doctrines about the hybrid kind of “Heroic” or “Long” Poem. But in most points the criticism of Ronsard justifies itself by a real adherence, conscious or unconscious, to the practical ideals of the French.

These characteristics recur (to much greater advantage, because of its far greater bulk, and in spite of its flagrant desultoriness) in the work of Vauquelin de la Fresnaye. Here we have, put certainly not with much method, but with plenty of talent, and at no unsuitable length, the whole of the Italian teaching, in small points and in large, that had commended itself to the French mind up to this time, with such additions, adaptations, and corrections as vernacular needs had induced, or vernacular genius insisted on. We see in it, very decidedly, the obsession of the “long poem,” which France was not to outgrow for two centuries. We see the tendency to burden criticism with innumerable petty “rules” (or with attentions to “licence” nearly as burdensome), which was also to beset 223the nation. And in general we see also what it may not be improper (in connection with a school so fond of neologism and word-imitation) to call the “pottering” tendency, which was the worse side of Pléiade criticism. Vauquelin has really a great deal to say, and much of what he has to say is sensible. He escapes many errors of his forerunners, more of his successors, and it is comparatively seldom that one feels inclined to put an absolute black mark against any of his suggestions or cautions. But the whole is not only formless, but also invertebrate. Vauquelin does not, like some of the Italians, confine himself to grave and lofty generalisations on the highest questions affecting Poetry. He does not, like others, or these same at other moments, take an orderly survey of detail according to a coherent scheme. He simply has, as the cant phrase goes, “a few remarks to offer” on much more than a few points.

It has been already said that this provisional, tentative, and somewhat ineffectual character is characteristic, and prophetically characteristic, of the school. The Pléiade did not, like Ronsard’s slightly younger contemporary Spenser and his followers in England, set French poetry once for all on the path on which, with whatever minor changes, it was henceforth to go. Some thirty or forty years of never wholly successful experiment were succeeded by an unjust supplanting, and by another thirty or forty of random tentatives, corresponding in some ways to those of England nearly a century earlier. Only then did France fall into a way, not by any means of perfection, but sufficiently suited to her genius to enable her to travel fast and far in it. It is a serious thing for Pléiade criticism that we have from it no thorough examination of any part of French literature. No doubt such examinations are not the strong point of Renaissance Criticism. But generally there is more approach to them in Italian, with the scattered remarks of the critics on Dante and Petrarch, with the controversies about the romanzi in general and the Orlando and Gerusalemme in particular; there is more even in English, with the surveys, imperfect as they are, of the earlier Elizabethans over the past of poetry, with the literature of the “classical metres” quarrel, 224with the (no doubt later) remarks of Ben on Shakespeare and others. The fault of Pléiade Criticism, in short, is that it is at once too particularist and too little particular.[288]

Crossing the Channel, as we lately crossed the Alps, we do not find a simple transmission of indebtedness. It would have been surprising, considering the strong intellectual interests of the Colet group, and the early presence in England of such a critical force as Erasmus, if this country had waited to receive a current merely transmitted through France from Italy. It is possible that, later, Gascoigne may have derived something from Ronsard, and it is quite certain that “E. K.'s” notes on the Calendar show symptoms of Pléiade influence, even in the bad point of contempt, or at least want of respect, for Marot. But it is exceedingly improbable that Ascham derived any impulsion from Du Bellay: it is certain, as we have seen, that he knew Italian critics like Pigna directly; and it is equally certain that, either by his own studies or through Cheke, his critical impulses must have been excited humanistically long before the French had got beyond the merely rhétoriqueur standard of Sibilet.

Hence, as well as for other reasons, English criticism develops itself, if not with entire independence, yet with sufficient conformity to its own needs. That practical bent which we have noticed in the French shows itself here also; but it is conditioned differently. We had, as they had in France, to fashion a new poetic diction; but it cannot be said that the critics did much for this: Spenser, as much as Coriolanus, might have said, “Alone I did it.” They did more in re metrica, and it so happened that they had, quite in their own sphere, to fight an all-important battle, the battle of the classical metres, which was of nothing like the same importance in French or in Italian. In dealing with these and other matters they fall into certain generations or successive groups.

In Ascham and his contemporaries the critical attitude was induced, but not altogether favourably conditioned, by certain forces, partly common to them with their Continental contemporaries, 225partly not. They all felt, in a degree most creditable to themselves (and contrasting most favourably with the rather opposite feeling of men so much greater and so much later as Bacon and Hobbes), that they must adorn their Sparta, that it was their business to get the vernacular into as good working order, both for prose and verse, as they possibly could. And what is more, they had some shrewd notions about the best way of doing this. The exaggerated rhetoric and “aureateness” of the fifteenth century had inspired them, to a man, with a horror of “inkhorn terms,” and, if mainly wrong, they were also partly right in feeling that the just and deserved popularity of the early printed editions of the whole of Chaucer threatened English with an undue dose of archaism.

Further, they were provided by the New Learning, not merely with a very large stock of finished examples of literature, but also with a not inconsiderable library of regular criticism. They did their best to utilise these; but, in thus endeavouring, they fell into two opposite, yet in a manner complementary, errors. In the first place, they failed altogether to recognise the continuity, and in a certain sense the equipollence, of literature—the fact that to blot out a thousand years of literary history, as they tried to do, is unnatural and destructive. In the second place, though their instinct told them rightly that Greek and Latin had invaluable lessons and models for English, their reason failed to tell them that these lessons must be applied, these models used, with special reference to the nature, the history, the development of English itself. Hence they fell, as regards verse, into the egregious and fortunately self-correcting error of the classical metres, as regards prose, into a fashion of style, by no means insalutary, as a corrective and reaction from the rhetorical bombast and clumsiness of the transition, but inadequate of itself, and needing to be counterdosed by the fustian and the familiarity which are the worse sides of Euphuism, in order to bring about the next stage. Lastly, these men looked too much to the future, and not enough to the past: they did not so much as condescend to examine the literary manner and nature even of Chaucer himself, still less of others.

226In the next generation, which gives us Gascoigne, Webbe, Puttenham, and Sidney, the same tendencies are perceived; but the Euphuist movement comes in to differentiate them on one side, and the influence of Italian criticism on the other. The classical metre craze has not yet been blown to pieces by the failure of even such a poet as Spenser to do any good with it, the fortunate recalcitrance of the healthy English spirit, and at last the crushing broadside of Daniel’s Defence of Rhyme. But it does no very great practical harm: and prose style is sensibly beautified and heightened. Some attempts are made, from Gascoigne downwards, to examine the actual wealth of English, to appraise writers, to analyse methods—attempts, however, not very well sustained, and still conditioned by the apparent ignorance of the writers that there was anything behind Chaucer, though Anglo-Saxon was actually studied at the time under Archbishop Parker’s influence. Further, the example of the Italian critics deflects the energy of our writers from the right way, and sends them off into pretty Platonisings about the proud place due to poetry, the stately status of the singer, and other agreeable but unpractical aberrations. This tendency is much strengthened by the Puritan onslaught on poetry generally and dramatic poetry in particular. In all this there is a great deal of interest, and many scattered aperçus of great value. Gascoigne’s little treatise is almost priceless, as showing us how English prosody was drifting on the shallows of a hard-and-fast syllabic arrangement, when the dramatists came to its rescue. Sidney, wrong as he is about the drama, catches hold of one of the very life-buoys of English poetry in his praise of the ballad. Daniel’s Defence puts the root of the rhyme-matter in the most admirable fashion. But we see that the classics are exercising on all the men of the time influences both bad and good, and in criticism, perhaps, rather bad than good; that the obsession of Latin in particular is heavy on them; and that the practice, both Latin and Greek, of what we have called beginning at the wrong end lies heaviest of all.

Nothing will show this more curiously than the words in which Sidney anticipated (and perhaps suggested) Ben’s censure 227of Spenser’s diction as to the Shepherd’s Calendar, especially if we remember that this was said by a personal friend and by an ardent lover of poetry. That there is something to be said against the dialect of the Calendar all reasonable critics will allow. As a poetic language it is, at its best, but a preliminary exercise for the glorious medium of The Faerie Queene; it is awkwardly and in some cases incorrectly blended; and, above all, the mere rusticity—the “hey-ho” and the rest—is a dangerous and doubtful expedient. But observe that Sidney says nothing of this kind. He “looks merely at the stop-watch.” Theocritus did not do it; Virgil did not do it; Sannazar did not do it; therefore Spenser must not do it. That his own elevation of a mere modern like Sannazar to this position of a lawgiver of the most tyrannic kind—of an authority not merely whose will is law, not merely whose prohibition is final, but whose bare abstention from something taboos that something from the use of all mankind for ever and ever,—that this did not strike Sidney as preposterous in itself, and as throwing doubt on the whole method, is wonderful. But even if he had stopped at Theocritus and Virgil, he would have been wrong enough. Here once more is the False Mimesis, the prava imitatio. Not only is the good poet to be followed in what he does, but what he does not do serves as a bar to posterity in all time from doing it.

There is another point in which Sidney and Ben are alike, and in which they may even seem to anticipate that general adoption of “Reason,” of “Good Sense” as the criterion, which the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries claimed as their own, and which some recent critics have rather kindly allowed them. Sidney’s raillery of the romantic life-drama, Ben’s reported strictures on the sea-coast of Bohemia, and his certain ones on “Cæsar did never wrong,” &c., express the very spirit of this cheap rationalism, which was later to defray a little even of Dryden’s criticism, almost the whole of Boileau’s, and far too much of Pope’s. The ancients, to do them justice, are not entirely to be blamed for this. There is very little of it in Aristotle, who quite understands that the laws of poetry are not 228the laws of history or of science.[289] But there is a great deal of it in Horace: and, as we shall see, the authority of the great Greek was, during the three centuriescenturies which form the subject of this volume, more and more used as a mere cloak for the opinions of the clever Roman. Meanwhile, such books as those of Webbe and Puttenham, such an ordeal by battle as that fought out by Campion and Daniel, even such critical jaculata as those of Meres and Bolton,[290] were all in different ways doing work, mistaken sometimes in kind, but always useful in general effect.

On the general Elizabethan position, as we have seen, Jonson himself made no great advance: in fact, he threw fresh intrenchments around it and fresh forces into its garrison. We may even, contrary to our wont in such cases, be rather glad that he did not enter upon a more extensive examination of his own contemporaries, because it is quite clear that he was not at the right point of view for making it. But it does not follow from this that he was not a critic, and a great critic. No one who was not this could have written the Shakespeare and the Bacon passages—in fact, in the former case, only a great magnanimity and a true sense of critical truth could have mixed so generous an acknowledgment with the candid avowal of so much disapproval. And, as we have said above, even where Ben was wrong, or at least insufficient, his critical gospel was the thing needed for the time to come, if not for the actual time. By a few years after his own death—by the middle of the century, that is to say—seventy years and more of such a harvest as no other country has ever had, had filled the barns of English to 229bursting with the ripest crops of romantic luxuriance—its treasure-houses with the gold and the ivory and the spices—if sometimes also with the apes and the peacocks—of Romantic exploration and discovery. There was no need to invite further acquisition—the national genius, in Ben’s own quotation, sufflaminandus erat. It was his task to begin the sufflamination: and he did it, not perhaps with a full apprehension of the circumstances, and certainly with nothing like a full appreciation of what the age, from its “Tamerlanes and Tamerchams” onwards, had done; but still did it. In his most remarkable book we see the last word of Elizabethan criticism, not merely in point of time, but in the other sense. Ben is beyond even Sidney, much more Webbe and Puttenham, not to mention Ascham and Wilson, in grasp; while, if we compare him with the Continental critics of his own time, he shows a greater sense of real literature than almost any of them. But, at the same time, he has not occupied the true standing-ground of the critic; he has not even set his foot on it, as Dryden, born before his death, was to do. In him, as in all these Renaissance critics, we find, not so much positive errors as an inability to perceive clearly where they are and what their work is.

Passing from the performances of the several countries[291] to the general critical upshot of the century, as we passed to those performances from the survey of individual works, we have already secured one perception of result. Criticism is once more constituted; it is constituted indeed much more fully, if by no means more methodically, than has ever been the case before. By the time of our last Italian writer, Faustino Summo (Vauquelin is accidentally, and Ben Jonson not so accidentally, later in the other countries, but neither represents a stage so really advanced), Criticism has, besides its ancient books of the Law, quite a library of modern prophets, commentators, scribes. The strings of authorities, so specially 230dear to the coming century, can be produced without any difficulty whatsoever: and however much these authorities may differ on minor points, their general drift is unmistakable. Isolated dissenters like Patrizzi may make good their own fastnesses; but the general army hardly troubles itself to besiege or even to mask them, it goes on its way to conquer and occupy the land. Of the constitution established, or shortly to be established, in the conquered districts, some sketch has been given, but a caution should here once more be interposed against taking the word “established” too literally. Still, all the dogmas of the Neo-Classic creed, its appeal to the ancients and its appeal to Reason or Nature or Sense, its strict view of Kinds, its conception of Licence and Rule, its Unities, are more or less clearly evolved. And fresh particulars—such as its sharp reaction from the allowance and even recommendation of terms of art, archaisms, &c., which had been partly adopted by some Italians and warmly championed by the Pléiade—are at hand. Indeed, the business of the seventeenth century is, according to the title which we have ventured to take for the next book, much more to crystallise what is already passing out of the states of digestion and solution—to codify precedent case-law—than to do anything new.

There is not only this important advance in at least poetical theory to be considered, but also an advance still more important, though as yet not formally marshalled and regimented, in the direction of critical practice—of the application directly, to books old and new, of the critical principles so arrived at. We have seen that, for good and sufficient reasons, there was not so very much of this in classical times proper, and that there was so little of it as to be almost nothing in the Middle Ages. It did not seem necessary, in the concluding chapters of the first volume, to multiply proofs of this, as they could have been multiplied, merely to display acquaintance with mediæval literature. To take two fresh ones here, each famous for other reasons, the well-known reference of Wolfram von Eschenbach at the end of the Parzival to the “unrightness” of Chrestien de Troyes’ version, and the godly wrath which made “Kyot” set things in better order, contains no literary criticism at all; 231the matter, according to the usual mediæval habit, is looked upon as a question of truth or falsehood, not of good or bad literary presentment. And when the equally well-known but anonymous scribe wrote jubilantly on the Cursor Mundi,

“This is the best book of all,”

it is as certain as anything can be that he was not thinking, as he might fairly have thought, of the not small skill in compilation and narration displayed in that mighty miscellany, but merely that it contained a great deal of useful instruction and pleasant history. In the notices of books and writers which accumulate during our present period this is more and more ceasing to be the case; it has in fact ceased to be so from almost the beginning.

Such an estimate as that given by Ascham as Cheke’s of Sallust simply could not have suggested itself to any mediæval mind; the Humanist practice of the fifteenth century had—quite early in the sixteenth—made it natural enough, at least as regards ancient writers. And it was constantly becoming more and more common as to moderns. The Italians, in a limited and scholastic fashion, had begun it long before as to Dante; they continued it in regard to Boccaccio and Petrarch; they were spurred on to practise it more and more, first by the immense popularity of the Orlando, and then by the rival (and deliberately urged as rival) charms of the Gerusalemme. Compare for one moment the survey of books and authors which we quoted or summarised from the Labyrinthus in the last volume with that which we have analysed from Lilius Giraldus in this—the whole point of view, the whole method of handling, is altered. In France and England more specially, attempts, clumsy, limited, subject to whatever epithet of qualification any one pleases to apply, as they may be, are made to take a backward historical view of poetry at least; and when great work such as Ronsard’s or Spenser’s is produced, there is a real, if rudimentary, attempt made to judge it critically. By the time that we reach Ben Jonson—who no doubt has a strong tinge of the seventeenth century superinduced, by nature as well as time, on his sixteenth-century nativity—such aperçus 232almost of the highest critical kind in their species, as those on Bacon and Shakespeare, are possible to at least the higher intellects,—it needs but a step to the very highest kind, such as that of Dryden on the same Shakespeare. That what we have called the crystallisation of a critical creed affects these estimates not always for the best is not of real importance—the point is that we have at last got them.

These are great things, but, still postponing criticism on this criticism as a whole, we may point out one or two drawbacks in it which already appear, and which are quite independent of individual inclination on the vexed questions of Classic or Romantic, Practice or Rule, Subject or Expression.

The first is that, to some extent unavoidably, but to a greater extent than that excuse will cover, the criticism which we have reviewed is criticism of poetry only. Most of it is quite openly and avowedly so. Poetica, Poetice, De Poetica, Della Poetica, Della Vera Poetica, Art Poétique, Art of Poetry, Apology for Poetry—these are the very titles of the books we have been discussing. When prose comes in at all, except on rare and mostly late occasions, it is only on questions more abstract or less abstract connected with poetry—“Whether Tragedy and Comedy may be written in Prose,” “Whether Verse is necessary to Poetry,” and the like. If poetry in ancient days was, though it received plenty of attention, sometimes injuriously postponed to oratory, it certainly now has its revenge. Oratory itself, though occasionally handled, obviously is so as a sort of legacy from the ancients themselves, from a sort of feeling that it would not be decent to say nothing about a subject on which Aristotle, and Cicero, and Quintilian have said so much. The formal Letter, being rather a favourite Italian institution, is not quite neglected; it receives some attention among ourselves from Ben. Whether History can or must give subjects for poetry is keenly debated; but the question is approached entirely from the side of interest in Poetry, not in History. At the very close of our period, we find so great a prose writer as Bacon doubting the solvency of vernacular prose; a little earlier we find Montaigne taking note of it chiefly, if at all, in regard to matter, Pasquier hardly taking notice of it at all.

233This is unfortunate, because it tends further to perpetuate the mischievous absorption in Kinds, and to postpone the attainment of the position from which, though the difference between prose and poetry may be seen more sharply than ever, the common literary qualities of both, and the way in which they affect the delight of the receiver, are at last perceived. It is unfortunate, further, because it tends to prevent the enjoyment of the full advantages which the modern literatures are gradually giving to the critic in the very departments—the prose romance, the essay, and others—where ancient criticism suffered most from the absence of material.

Another drawback which it may seem captious, or ungenerous, or even childish, to urge, but which really has a great deal to do with the matter, is that, active as the period was in criticism, it did not produce a single very great critic practising on a great scale. Its four or five critics of greatest literary genius were (I exclude Bacon for reasons given, and Spenser hardly comes in) Ronsard, Du Bellay, Tasso, Sidney, and Ben Jonson. The two Frenchmen dealt with but a small part of the subject, and from but a special point of view; Tasso was mainly “fighting a prize,” and his own prize; Sidney’s was a very little tractate of general, if generous, protest, and entered into no applications; Ben’s critical remains are un-co-ordinated notes. On the other hand, of the specially critical writers, Scaliger on the strictly erudite and strictly classical side, Castelvetro in a sort of middle station, and Patrizzi as a voice crying in the wilderness, are perhaps the only three who rise distinctly above mediocrity. And, as has been pointed out already, Scaliger is too much of a pedant, Castelvetro is a mere commentator, and Patrizzi a philosopher militant, who carries on one of his campaigns in the province of criticism.

The disadvantages of this are twofold. Not merely do we get no brilliant and, at least in appearance and claim, authoritative exposition of the subject, like that of Boileau or that of Pope later on the dogmatic side, like those of Dryden and Johnson on the illustrative and exemplifying; but the whole critical system comes into existence by a process of haphazard accretion—by (to repeat a metaphor already used) an accumulation 234of individual judgments at common law. No doubt this gives a certain strength, a certain naturalness, to the creed when it is formed. It has not been foisted on the communis sensus—that sensus has been inured and trained to it. The extraordinary toughness and vitality of the resultant is very likely due to this. But it caused also some of that inconsistency and apparent irrationality which a system of common law almost necessarily contracts as it grows: and it was more and more driven to throw over these inconsistencies and irrationalities that cloak of factitious Reason, or Sense, or Nature which, by the eighteenth century, becomes the mere threadbare disguise of a decrepit Duessa.

If, and when, we arrive at the close of that century, after a somewhat shorter halt and survey at the termination of the seventeenth, when the deaths of Boileau and Dryden made a real break—we shall have to complete this necessarily partial view of the whole Neo-Classic dispensation. We have seen it here in its Period of Origins, and, without endeavouring to add too many strokes to the picture, we may point to the fresh illustration of that principle which has been adumbrated (I fear, from some remarks of good critics, with insufficient perspicuity) at the close of the last volume. We saw that the tendency of Greek criticism was good, because, whether it was perfect criticism in itself or not, it was exactly the criticism needed yet further to perfect the perfections of Greek literature; and that much the same was the case in Latin. We saw that the quiescence of Criticism in Mediæval times permitted the gracious wilding of mediæval art to flourish unchecked and fill the waste places of the field. But here we see a new thing, hinted at before, the opposition, that is to say, of criticism to at least the best creation. Sidney’s dramatic criticism simply would, if it could, sweep Shakespeare from rerum natura, and he looks half askance at the work of his own familiar friend Spenser. Ben would put the “Tamerlanes and Tamerchams” in the dustbin. To that untamable Romantic luxuriance which makes the glory of English literature at the time, which gives French most of its actual strength, and which, in failing measure, still supports the pride of Italy, the general tendency 235of Renaissance criticism opposes a perpetual “Thou“Thou shalt not.” It is not too much heeded—that would have been disastrous; but it is heeded to some extent, and that is salutary. A kind of check is put on the too wild curvetings, the too meteoric flights, of Pegasus. There was always the danger that Jeronimo at the beginning and Cleveland at the end might have too truly expressed our own great age; that the odd word-coinage of the Pléiade, and the tasteless rococo stuff of French literature about 1640, might have done the same for France. Against this the critics raised unceasing voices; and, though the voices were sometimes those of geese, they really did something to save the Capitol.


285. See vol. i. p. 321 note.

286. Fracastoro and Scaliger could at once obtain a writ of ease, as De Quincey is evidently speaking of “Italian” critics in the vernacular. I hope he was not thinking of Tasso here, or of Gravina later: but the seventeenth and eighteenth century men are certainly in more danger of his judgment.

287. M. Pellissier and others have taken this line.

288. Some exception ought, perhaps, to be made for Pasquier: but not much.

289. Yet even he does condescend to it too much in his notices of “objections” towards the end of the Poetics.

290. These judgments might of course be reinforced enormously by extracts from letters and poems commendatory, as well as from substantive examples, of Elizabethan literature, prose or verse. But this is just one of the points in which the constantly increasing pressure of material makes abstinence, or at least rigid temperance, necessary as we come downwards. Some very notable passages in creative works—Shakespeare’s remarks on drama among the more, and Ben’s on “men’s and women’s poets” among the less—are glanced at elsewhere: Webster’s famous “catalogue raisonné” (yet not wholly so) of his great companions, and his odd confession of inability to manage “the passionate and weighty nuntius,” tempts fuller notice. But one must refrain.

291. It has seemed better to reserve Sturm, Fabricius, and the few other critics of sixteenth-century Germany, till the next Book, for reasons there to be exposed. The reasons for similarly putting off the Spaniards have already been touched upon: and the minor nations do not press.

237

BOOK V

THE CRYSTALLISING OF
THE NEO-CLASSIC CREED


It is not enough that Aristotle has said so, for Aristotle drew his models of tragedy from Sophocles and Euripides; and, if he had seen ours, might have changed his mind.”—Dryden.

239

CHAPTER I.

FROM MALHERBE TO BOILEAU.

THE SUPPLANTING OF ITALY BY FRANCE—BRILLIANCY OF THE FRENCH REPRESENTATIVES—MALHERBE—THE ‘COMMENTARY ON DESPORTES’—WHAT CAN BE SAID FOR HIS CRITICISM—ITS DEFECTS STIGMATISED AT ONCE BY REGNIER—HIS ‘NINTH SATIRE’—THE CONTRAST OF THE TWO A LASTING ONE—THE DIFFUSION OF SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY CRITICISM—VAUGELAS—BALZAC—HIS LETTERS—HIS CRITICAL DISSERTATIONS—OGIER AND THE PREFACE TO ‘TYR ET SIDON’—CHAPELAIN: THE HOPELESSNESS OF HIS VERSE—THE INTEREST OF HIS CRITICISM—THE ‘SENTIMENTS DE L’ACADÉMIE SUR LE CID’—PREFACES—‘SUR LES VIEUX ROMANS’—LETTERS, ETC.—CORNEILLE—THE THREE ‘DISCOURSES’—THE ‘EXAMENS’—LA MESNARDIÈRE—SARRASIN—SCUDÉRY—MAMBRUN—SAINT-EVREMOND—HIS CRITICAL QUALITY AND ACCOMPLISHMENT—HIS VIEWS ON CORNEILLE—ON CHRISTIAN SUBJECTS, ETC.—ON ANCIENTS AND MODERNS—GUI PATIN: HIS JUDGMENT OF BROWNE—TALLEMANT, PELLISSON, MÉNAGE, MADAME DE SÉVIGNÉ—THE ‘ANA’ OTHER THAN MÉNAGE’S, ESPECIALLY THE ‘HUETIANA’—'VALESIANA'—‘SCALIGERANA’—AND ‘PARRHASIANA’—PATRU, DESMARETS, AND OTHERS—MALEBRANCHE—THE HISTORY OF BOILEAU’S REPUTATION—THE ‘ART POÉTIQUE’—ITS FALSE LITERARY HISTORY—ABSTRACT OF IT—CRITICAL EXAMINATION OF IT—WANT OF ORIGINALITY—FAULTS OF METHOD—OBSESSION OF GOOD SENSE—ARBITRARY PROSCRIPTIONS—BOILEAU’S OTHER WORKS—THE ‘SATIRES’—THE ‘EPIGRAMS’ AND ‘EPISTLES’—PROSE: THE ‘HÉROS DE ROMAN’; THE ‘RÉFLEXIONS SUR LONGIN’—THE “DISSERTATION ON 'JOCONDE'”—A “SOLIFIDIAN OF GOOD SENSE”—THE PLEA FOR HIS PRACTICAL SERVICES—HISTORICAL EXAMINATION OF THIS—CONCLUDING REMARKS ON HIM—LA BRUYÈRE AND FÉNELON—THE “DES OUVRAGES DE L’ESPRIT”—GENERAL OBSERVATIONS—JUDGMENTS OF AUTHORS—FÉNELON: THE ‘DIALOGUES SUR L’ELOQUENCE’—'SUR LES OCCUPATIONS DE L’ACADÉMIE FRANÇAISE'—AND ITS CHALLENGE TO CORRECTNESS—THE ABBÉ D’AUBIGNAC—HIS ‘PRATIQUE DU THÉÂTRE’—RAPIN—HIS METHOD PARTLY GOOD—HIS PARTICULAR ABSURDITIES AS TO HOMER IN BLAME—AS TO VIRGIL IN PRAISE—AS TO OTHERS—THE READING OF HIS RIDDLE—LE BOSSU AND THE ABSTRACT EPIC—BOUHOURS—ENCYCLOPÆDIAS 240AND NEWSPAPERS—BAYLE—BAILLET—THE ETHOS OF A CRITICAL PEDANT—GIBERT—THE ANCIENT AND MODERN QUARREL—ITS SMALL CRITICAL VALUE.

The causes of the transference of the course of critical empire, northwards as well as westwards, from Italy to France, in the seventeenth century, lie (except in so far as they will body themselves forth in the plain tale of this course which follows) somewhat outside the plan which has been traced for our History. The supplanting of Italy by France. They belong, in part at least, to that “metacritic” and guesswork which we endeavour to exclude. Indeed, as usually, and more than as usually, in such case, the old puzzle of “the egg from the Owl, or the Owl from the egg?” besets us specially in this division of the History of that Art for which some have had it that the bird of Pallas is a specially suitable symbol. We can see the importance of the establishment of the French Academy, when only the first third of the century had passed, of the extraordinary influence of coteries like that of the Hotel Rambouillet, of the coincidence of the towering ambition of a youthful king and the concentrated force of his at least partially reunited kingdom, with the existence of a remarkable knot of great men of letters, including one critic of the most masterful, if not quite the most masterly, type. But can there possibly be any causation in this latter coincidence? Can we say why Conrart’s Academy, instead of lasting for a time and then breaking up, became a national institution? why the Rambouillet blue-stockings were more influential than those who haunted Mrs Montagu’s peacock-room, or put rubbish into the Bath-Easton vase? Only by guessing, or by arguing in stately circle about national temperaments. And we endeavour to avoid both these things here.[292]

241What is certain is, that while on the one hand Italy is scarcely less addicted to criticism, and scarcely less fruitful of Brilliancy of the French representatives. critics, in the seventeenth century than in the sixteenth, and while the authority of Scaliger, Castelvetro, Minturno, Piccolomini, is felt[293] all over Europe, the contemporary practitioners of the art exercise no such authority, and are of almost the least importance. A page for every score that we gave them in the last Book will nearly suffice in this. In France, on the other hand, no part of the century is not full of the critical labour, and no part is without critics to whom, whether we grant the epithets “good” or “great” or not, we cannot possibly refuse those of “important,” “influential”—in more than one or two cases even “epoch-making.” In the first generation we have the half-revolution, half-reaction of Malherbe, who, for good or for ill, determined the main course of French poetry for two whole centuries, and great part of that course for three. In the second we have the similar work in prose, of Balzac by counsel and example, by example of Descartes and Pascal; the contest over the Cid, and the purblind but still intentionally business-like investigations of Hédelin-d’Aubignac; the constant debates of the Academy: and, perhaps most important of all, the general engouement for literary discussion of pedant and fine gentleman, of prude and coquette alike. From the third come the ambitious code-making of Boileau; the squabble, tedious and desultory, but in intention at least wholly critical, of the Ancients and Moderns; the immense collections of Baillet and others; the work, not bulky but full of germ and promise, of Saint-Evremond, Madame de Sévigné, Boileau, La Bruyère, Fénelon. What century earlier (some may say, what century later) will give us, in any country, a critical galaxy like this, where the stars dart, 242in at least most cases, so many other rays besides those of criticism?

It is possible—as the historian of such a subject as this could wish that it were possible oftener—to do justice to Malherbe’s undoubtedly prominent position in the history of criticism without wasting much space on him. Malherbe. The universally known phrase of Boileau,[294] though containing an innuendo of the grossest critical injustice, and led up to by a passage of astounding historical ignorance or falsification, is yet substantially true. The stage of French poetry which Malherbe started was a new stage; it was a stage not at once, but before long, acquiesced and persevered in by all but the whole population of the French Parnassus; and it cannot be said that seventy years of almost unceasing effort have done more than partially substitute a fresh one. Further, it is undoubtedly in favour of Malherbe, though the compliment may seem a left-handed one, that he was not a man of commanding genius in any way; that he left no important critical work; that his creative work is very scanty, far from consummate as a rule, and by no means all in the style he himself approved; and that even the secondhand accounts which we have of his doctrines are scrappy, vague, and indirect. For it is quite clear that a man who exercises such influence, and exercises it practically at once, in such circumstances, must have hit upon the right string, must have coincided strangely with the general feeling, temper, aspirations, taste of his countrymen. Our documents for these doctrines are an extensive, but fragmentary, commentary on Desportes (the still more destructive and characteristic handling of Ronsard seems either to be a myth or never to have been preserved on paper), the Life by Racan,[295] some phrases in the Letters, the vivid and admirable attack of Regnier,[296] and the remarks of writers in his own and the next generation.

243All concur in showing Malherbe to us as, on the one hand, mainly a verbal critic, and on the other, as verbal critics usually, but by no means always or necessarily are, singularly unable to rise above the word, or its nearest neighbour, the mere sense. Both these things made him the natural enemy (though, for his earlier years at least, he was a more or less disloyal follower) of the Pléiade. Their abundant word-coinages and word-borrowings shocked him; he did not want, and could not feel,[297] the poetic souffle which they managed to give by means, or in despite, of their vocabulary. Racan, a rather simple but absolutely honest creature, confesses that his master n’aimait du tout les Grecs, regarded Pindar especially as a maker of galimatias, liked Statius and Seneca best of the Latins,[298] and (it was generous) classed the Italians with the Greeks. On the other hand, in French, he had at least the merit of knowing exactly what he wanted, and exactly how to get it. He it was who first invented those rigid laws of rhyme, which even French classicism never quite adopted—the proscription of the different use of a and e in such rhymes as ance and ence, ent and ant; the rule against simples and compounds of them, and even words which commonly go together, out of verse, as père and mère. He was equally rigid on the cæsura: and Racan is not to be suspected of catering for laughers, though Tallemant might be, when he tells us that, while actually in the death-struggle, Malherbe revived himself to tell his nurse that she had used a word qui n'ètoit pas bien Français.

It is, however, in the Commentary on Desportes,[299] and there 244only, that we have the real Malherbe at first hand for our purpose. The Commentary on Desportes. It is a very remarkable piece, and the first of the kind in modern times;[300] though Gellius and Macrobius no doubt set a certain pattern for it in ancient. Nor am I acquainted with anything more thorough in the particular species; the modern Zoilus, as a rule, is equally inferior to Malherbe in thoroughness, acuteness, and learning. More than 200 pages—a large page and a small type—are occupied in M. Lalanne’s edition (the only one) with the citations and remarks, the former being rigidly confined to the line or two (rarely more) that Malherbe annotated. It would be almost worth while to reprint[301] the original volume as it exists scored by the critic’s hand, and I do not know that it would be at all unfair to Desportes; for it is not the author who comes worst out of the exposure.

Whatever may be said against Malherbe, he cannot be accused of verbiage. He constantly contents himself with a single word—bourre (“padding”), cheville (“expletive”), or simply note or nota, which expresses, much more forcibly, the “Will the reader believe,” or “It will hardly be credited” of our less succinct Aristarchs. It is curious how sensitive Malherbe’s ear is to certain suggestions of real or fancied cacophony, or absurdity, in juxtaposition of different words. There is no doubt that the French habit of delivering verse in a sort of recitative or singsong, running the syllables very much together, putting strong emphasis on certain vowels and slurring others, makes things like the famous “vaincu Loth” and “vingt culottes,” “vieillard stupide” and “vieil as de pique” less of mere childishness with them than with us. Malherbe seems to have a perfect obsession of this kind, especially in 245the direction of alliterated syllables. Thus he annotates the harmless line—

“Si la foi plus certaine en une âme non feinte”—
n’en, nu, n’a;

and, still more in the style of the two later jokes—

“Mais vous, belle tyranne, aux Nérons comparable”—
Tira nos nez!

Indeed, he never loses an opportunity of blackmarking this collocation of letters in different words, a point to which the later Latin rhetoricians had perhaps made the French specially attentive, but notice of which, except in the rarest cases, would be thought unworthy of anybody but a schoolboy (or a comic journalist of not the highest class) in England.

It was perhaps a little dangerous for Malherbe to be so prodigal of the words “pedantry” and “stupidity” as he is; while time and use have sometimes made his peremptory judgments look rather foolish. For instance, Desportes had used poumons in the plural, as we have practically always used “lungs” in English. “On ne dit,” says our usher, with an almost audible bang of the ferule on the desk,—“On ne dit point qu’un homme ait des poumons: et ne m’allègue pas qu’il y a plusieurs lobes au poumon, car tu serais un sot.” Poor posterity! It has been (in France) tolerably docile to Malherbe, but it has in this respect undoubtedly written itself down an ass—or perhaps him. For no Frenchman now would hesitate to use the word in the plural. He is constantly objecting to consommer in the sense of consumer; he ejaculates (with the sort of indignant bark which we hear so often from him and from critics of his kind) on

“Et pensant de mes faits l'étrange frénésie”

“Je ne sais si c’est allemand ou anglais: mais je sais bien que ce n’est pas français”; stigmatises (surely with injustice?) trop injuste Amour as a mauvais vocatif, and shows his own want of poetic imagination and poetic sympathy by scouting as bad the beautiful epithet amoureuse in

“Enflammant l’air d’amoureuse clarté,”

246for which some of us would excuse Desportes many worse things than he has actually done. On the other hand, the mere grammarian comes out in his note on

“Où de tant de beauté ton œil eut jouissance
Que le seul souvenir chasse au loin ma souffrance,”—
Le seul souvenir de quoi?

I should rather like to give more of this; but the reader will no doubt say Sat prata. What can be said for his criticism. We must not be too hard on it. In the first place, it is (as criticism of the Zoilus kind is by no means always) transparently honest criticism. Malherbe does not garble; he does not foist his own misconception, not to say his own stupidity, on his author, and then condemn him for it; he does not, like Boileau, fling offensive and contemptuous epithets broadcast without anything to support them. Further, there can be not the very slightest doubt that such an office as his could, at the time, be very usefully filled. The French sixteenth century, like our own, had poured, and the early French seventeenth century had, also like our own, begun to pour, a vast and rather indiscriminately selected reinforcement of word and phrase and image into the language. All this wanted sorting, arranging—in some cases, though no doubt not in so many as Malherbe thought, rejecting and clearing out. The mere French grammar, which Vaugelas was soon to write, had not been written; and the Arts Poetic in existence were, as we have already seen, either technical and higgledy-piggledy, or like that of Vauquelin (which appeared just as Malherbe was beginning his crusade, and of which it would not be uninteresting to have a copy annotated by him as he annotated Desportes), almost as higgledy-piggledy, and much vaguer, on all technical points except some of the crotchets of the Pléiade. Indeed, the best justification for Malherbe is the French poetical history of the next thirty or forty years. He may claim some, though but little, of the merit of such different poets as Corneille and Voiture; the defects, where they really existed, of Boileau’s victims can seldom or never be charged upon him, and might sometimes have been avoided by listening to his precepts.

247This, I think, is fairly generous as well as just; generosity may now make her bow and leave justice unfettered; but justice herself need not go beyond that admirable pronouncement of Regnier, which has been already referred to. Its defects stigmatised at once by Regnier. The great satirist, the passionate poet, could hardly have needed a personal grievance to spur him on to the composition of his Ninth Satire, though the generosity of his character might have induced silence had not Malherbe broken their friendship. The address to “Rapin[302] le favori d’Apollon et des Muses[303] begins by graceful compliments, but turns soon and sharply on

“Ces resveurs dont la Muse insolente
Censurant les plus vieux, arrogamment se vante
De reformer les vers.”

If we have given Malherbe the credit of being the first modern critic to play the awful Aristarch with a contemporary in the true and full Aristarchian manner, Regnier must deserve that of being the first poet of genius in modern times to undertake a real chevauchée in the interests of the true criticism against the false. His Ninth Satire. The Satire is not faultless; there is some divagation, and an attempt (giving some countenance to the deplorable excesses, in the opposite direction of insulting poverty, which Boileau and Pope permit themselves) to set the profits and prosperity of Desportes 248against the comparative neediness of Malherbe. But this neediness was only comparative; and Regnier has the good taste never to name his adversary, and to let the arrows find their mark without vulgar personal abuse. The spirit of the piece is delightful; its straight hitting never baulks the game; and the verse is often of the very first quality. Read—I only wish I had room to quote—the passage, which only Juvenal and Dryden have equalled, on Malherbe’s contempt alike of the Greeks and the Pléiade (20-27); that on his elevation of the mere vernacular, as the test of language, which follows; the denunciation of his arrogant assumption of knowledge as being his own peculiar, which follows that; and the famous diatribe of forty verses long, and with every other verse a triumph, which scoffs at the anxiety—

“Prendre garde qu’un qui ne heurte une diphtongue,”

which labels the whole proceeding—

“C’est proser de la rime et rimer de la prose;”

compares it to the tricks of rouging and dressing up in women, and contrasts the natural beauties of poetry with all this powder and pomatum.

The first hundred lines are the best part of the satire, and the remainder is, to a certain extent, amplification and repetition. Yet it is good art, and good sense, not merely in the scattered phrases—

“Sans juger nous jugeons,”

and

“Votre raison vous trompe, aussi bien que vos yeux,”

and

“O débile raison! où est ores ta bride,”

which hit at once the foible and the forte of the criticism of the century; but in the final sting—

“Mais, Rapin, à leur gout si les vieux sont profanes,—
Si Virgile, le Tasse, et Ronsard sont des ânes—
Sans perdre en ces discours les temps que nous perdons,
Allons comme eux aux champs, et mangeons des chardons!”

249One might write a whole essay on these wonderfully prophetic and (no doubt to the writer half-unconsciously) many-sided[304] lines. After two centuries Europe did “go to the fields”—and she found something better to eat there than thistles.

For the moment, as we have seen before in other cases, the voice crying in the wilderness found only a wilderness to cry in. The contrast of the two a lasting one. Men could not mistake the vigour and verve of Regnier’s verse, but they either disregarded his doctrine or misunderstood it. Malherbe was their music-maker then; they understood him.[305] In the contrast of these two we have practically a contrast which subsists to the present day, and which we do not find by any means so sharply accentuated in ancient criticism—that of the critic who looks only at the stop-watch, and of the critic who looks beyond it; of the critic of form and the critic of spirit. But the curious thing is that for the last three centuries the antagonists have behaved exactly like Hamlet and Laertes, or even like that puzzling pair in the lower circles of the Inferno. They take from time to time each other’s parts, each other’s weapons, and renew the contest with changed persons, or at least rapiers. At first sight it may seem as if Malherbe and, after him, Boileau were simply insisting on form and expression; as if Regnier, and those who at longer intervals have followed him, were those who say that “all depends upon the subject.” But a more accurate acquaintance with the History which is to follow will show us that this is far from being the case. Malherbe had so little opportunity of shaping, or took such little trouble to shape, his critical ideas that it is perhaps the safer way not to draw up any complete creed for him, as M. Brunot and Mr Spingarn have done. But in Boileau, as we shall see, there is a distinct attempt, which has been practically 250followed by all of his side since, to prescribe expression, subject, spirit, and everything—to insist not merely that the work shall be good, but that it shall be good according to sealed patterns, in choice of subject as well as in method, in method as well as in form, in form as well as in language.

There can be very little doubt that the private discussions which, as we know from Racan, Malherbe used, for years before his death, to hold with Racan himself and others, and the letters which he also exchanged with younger men, had a very great deal to do with the wide development of criticism in the second third of the century. The diffusion of seventeenth century criticism. The fact of this development is certain; it is vouched for by the appearance of literary subjects in the Ana, and in Tallemant’s Historiettes, by the foundation of the Academy, by the Cid quarrel, practically by almost everything we know of the time that concerns literature. But we must deal, according to our wont, with the matter par personnages. Of such personages we have, in the first place, Vaugelas, Balzac, Ogier, and Chapelain, to whom we may join Ménage, Gui Patin, Tallemant himself, and the far greater names of Saint-Evremond and Corneille. Then we can take Boileau—at least in reputation one of the culminating points or personages of our history—and the less exclusively critical deliverances of La Bruyère, of Fénelon, and of Malebranche; can give some account of the Quarrel—tenacious of life, if scarcely vivacious—of the Ancients and Moderns; diverge to the scholastic and somewhat dismal but important performances of La Mesnardière and others, of Hédelin and Le Bossu, Rapin and Bouhours, and end by some account of the miscellaneous compilations and observations of journalists and savants. The matter is abundant in all conscience; it is at least sufficiently varied, and the real greatness of some at least of the persons concerned should save it from being insipid.

We may all the better pass directly from Malherbe to Vaugelas[306] because this is about the last place in this History 251where we can give special attention to merely verbal and grammatical criticism. Vaugelas. In this Malherbe had at least the absolute, and almost admirable, courage of his opinions. On the one hand he transfers the prudery of the Ciceronians (v. supra, p. 12) to French, and will not allow even an analogue such as accroît on the strength of surcroît. On the other he bars all the delightful Pléiade diminutives, likes not technical terms, is so horrified at any indelicate suggestion that his countrymen really need not have ridiculed our “sho[c]king,” and has a whole black list of “plebeian” expressions. Everything is to be “according to rule,” and the rule is to be drawn with as few exceptions as possible—and with as few inclusions.

It is no wonder that Regnier opened the full broadside of his magnificent poetical rhetoric against this system; and it is only a pity that nobody less fantastic than Mlle. de Gournay—Montaigne’s fille d’alliance, and almost the first as almost the oddest of blue-stockings—took up the parable more practically against it. But the set of the tide, as we have said, was with him. La Mothe le Vayer, a little later, in his Considérations sur l’Eloquence Française de ce temps “transacts,” though he is on the whole on the side of liberty. And enfin Vaugelas vint, the Savoyard[307] who was to teach France French. His famous Remarques did not appear till 1647, when he was fifty-two, and only three years before his death, but the book expresses work much older.[308]

Vaugelas, to do him justice, has not the “pistolling ways” of Malherbe. Usage is his standard, but, as in the old jest, the coin is no sooner in the child’s pocket than he is told not to spend it. It is good usage only that you must follow; and the goodness of course is penes nos. It would be neither interesting nor proper here to discuss Vaugelas’ merely grammatical precepts, but it is permissible to point out that he, first of all moderns—or at any rate more than any early modern—contributed to bring about the disastrous idea that grammar exists 252independently, instead of being a generalisation, partly from the usage which even great writers cannot violate, partly from their own. But it is worth observing that, according to him, you must not use technical words, popular words, improper words (it is dreadful to say “breast,” for do we not talk of a “breast of mutton or veal”?), poetical words in prose, archaisms, neologisms, which last he hates more than anything else. And when he comes to style, Purity, Clearness, Sobriety, and so forth are of course his cardinal virtues.

Jean Guez de Balzac, who, in the rather idle nomenclature of traditional literary history, has usually been styled “the Malherbe of French prose,” is on the whole more important in the history of French style than in that of French criticism. Balzac. He was not, as we have seen from the phrase quoted above, by any means an indiscriminate admirer of his correspondent—in fact, though not exactly a Gascon,[309] he was enough of a Southerner to feel nettled at the Northern arrogance which undertook dégasconner la France. But he was himself an ardent disciple of “purity,” and the principal objection that even posterity has made to his Socrate Chrétien, his Aristippe, his Prince, and most of his elaborate Letters, all of which were fanatically admired by contemporaries, is that they are scarcely more than pieces of epideictic, with very little substance in them.

These same letters, moreover, contain numerous critical passages; while a whole division of his Works[310] is critical. His Letters. The interest, however, of the most literary part of the Letters, those to Chapelain, as a whole, is not so much on Balzac’s side as on Chapelain’s; and the subjects of them will, at any rate in part, be best treated when we come to discuss that (in the latter part of his own lifetime and since) much-enduring writer. To Bois-Robert Balzac confides (III. 7) that he only cares for verses as he does for melons—both must be in absolute perfection if they are to please him; also that the philosopher’s stone will be found as soon as the sort of eloquence that he values. The thousand pages of the 253Letters are sprinkled with finery of this sort; but better matter is not very common. The somewhat hollow elegance which the French allow to be the chief merit of Balzac does not lend itself well to real criticism: nor, to do him justice, does he much attempt this, even to men of letters like Conrart, Heinsius, Descartes, or to Chapelain himself. Sometimes he drops into verbal criticism, as in VI. 57, where he consents to call Mlle. de Gournay herself traductrice and rhétoricienne, but not poétesse or philosophesse. The letter to Scudéry in reference to his attacks on The Cid is very sensible and in good taste; but (as Balzac indeed generally is) much more ethical and “gentlemanly” than æsthetic (XII. 20). Even when he writes directly to Corneille (XVI. 9) about Cinna he cannot get much beyond elegant generalities as to this Rome being the Rome de Tite Live. So that it is not surprising, when we come to the Chapelain Letters themselves (of which, besides a few stray ones earlier, there are six entire Books, XVII.-XXII.) that although most of them touch literature, and many contain critical remarks or judgments,[311] there is little of much interest. Only now and then do we come across such a refreshment as: “Why, sir, what prodigy do you tell me of? Is it possible that any one with a drop of common-sense in him can prefer the Spanish poets to the Italians? and take the visions of a certain Lope de Vega for reasonable compositions?” (XX. 127). His remarks on Ronsard and Malherbe, “the Martyr and the Tyrant” (XXII. 20), are fair, and with room one might extend the anthology. But on the whole, though Balzac was a very handsome letter-writer, and could, and did, give all the Frank Churchills of Europe lessons in that art, he was not very much of a critic.

His set Critical Dissertations quite confirm this verdict. His Critical Dissertations. He opens them with a great deal about Discipline, Justesse, Bienséance, the Mean, and the like. He tells us (vol. ii. p. 537) that any one who likes Ariosto would prefer a Siren to a beautiful woman—the answer to which 254challenge may be justly suspended by the true critic till he has a Siren produced before him. There might be much to be said for her. He has some not unpleasant remarks on the obligatory subject of the great sonnet-duel between Voiture’s “Uranie” and Benserade’s “Job”: but he has not, so far as I remember, discovered the critical truth that their beauty lies in the singular charm of the first line of the one and the last of the other. He is in one place (ii. 597) almost savage with Montaigne, of whom he says that, though he be adopted father to Mlle. de Gournay, esteemed by Father Paul, and allégué par le Chancelier Baccon (sic), he can see nothing in his Essays but equivoques and mistakes of judgment. This, however, is said chiefly in reference to Montaigne’s Latinity and knowledge of Latin: and elsewhere (pp. 657-662) there is a set judgment much more favourable, though still smacking of the double prejudice against a prophet of his own country and a man of the last generation. But his Dissertation on or against the Burlesque[312] style, when one remembers the excesses in which, from Scarron down to Dassoucy, men were about to indulge, is not contemptible: and there are amusing things in his Barbon, a sort of elaborate Theophrastian portrait of a young pedant, from which Scriblerus may have borrowed.

Vaugelas, as we have seen, did not finally elaborate his work till some twenty years after Malherbe’s death, and Balzac, though a correspondent of the Norman poet, outlived him by more than a quarter of a century. Ogier and the Preface to Tyr et Sidon. But in the very year (1628) of that death appeared a document on the other side, and taking that side 255in flank at the point where it was, with the majority, to be most victorious. This was the Preface of François Ogier to the second edition of the Tyr et Sidon of Daniel d’Anchères, or rather (for this is a mere anagram) Jean de Schélandre.[313] The play is almost the only worthy representative, in French, of that English-Spanish drama which set the Unities at defiance;[314] the Preface, written twenty years after the first appearance of the play, but seven before the author’s death, is a brief but extraordinarily remarkable vindication, in principle, of Schélandre’s practice. Until M. Asselineau, in 1854, published an article on the subject, and the Bibliothèque Elzévirienne, two years later, included both play and preface in the eighth volume of the invaluable Ancien Théâtre Français, both were practically unknown. Even then notice of them was for a long time confined to literary historians; and of late an attempt has been made to put the Preface aside as the mere freak of a student, in opposition to the taste of the time and the necessities of the stage. That the general course of literature in France followed for a time the line which Ogier argued against, and to which Schélandre ran counter, is perfectly true. But this is quite indifferent (except as a matter to be registered) to history, which knows perfectly well that Athanasius and his world are always changing places and principles. Moreover, it is quite a mistake to think that Ogier writes merely from the study, and with no consideration of the stage. Like Cinthio, like Patrizzi, like Castelvetro himself, he is no mere study-theorist. On the contrary he carries the war into the enemy’s camp with a refreshing audacity and no small force. It is the classical arrangement, he says, which offense le judicieux spectateur, with its improbable and unnatural coincidences and tallyings. How, he asks, in a passage interesting to compare with Sidney’s satirical description of the opposite style, do the identifying rings, the shepherd-fosterers, the good old nurses, always turn up comme par art de magie exactly at the right moment? How 256is it that Creon, and the old attendant of Laius, and the Corinthian who picked Œdipus up, all rendezvous at Athens in the nick of time? Is verisimilitude observed even in the Agamemnon? Is there anything dramatic at all—anything more than sheer narration—in the Persæ? Can the extreme defenders of the Unity of Time work out the Antigone on their lines? or the Heautontimoroumenos? Then he proceeds to account (not at all badly) for the practice of the ancients, and then to revert to the only sound argument—that of Cinthio and Pigna in the matter of the Romanzi, of Il Lasca in reference to Italian comedy—that Athens and Rome, and the lives and customs of both, are not modern countries and their lives and customs, that the practice of the one can give no final and prohibitive rule to the practice of the other.[315]

We are not in the least concerned to argue for this Preface. It is enough to point out its bold and independent spirit, and to lay special stress on the fact that Ogier fully admits that he is defending, if not a heresy, an orthodoxy which is not popular, offers to explain “pourquoi nous nous sommes jetez à quartier du chemin ordinaire,” speaks of the Unity of Time as “cette règle que nos critiques veulent nous faire garder si religieusement à cette heure,” indirectly condemns the Unity of Place in his arguments, and vindicates the full tragi-comic blending of Actions. Now, this was in 1628, eight years before the Cid and the Sentiments de l’Académie, even a year before Mairet’s Sophonisbe earned the reputation of being the first French piece that was absolutely “correct.” This is of itself enough to show how erroneous is the idea, once common and still repeated, that the discussion over the Cid, with Scudéry for mover, was in the nature of a surprise, and that Chapelain, if he most certainly did not invent the Unities, introduced them into France.

Although M. Bourgoin, and one or two others, have done something of late years to relieve Chapelain himself of the weight—not so much of obloquy as of contemptuous ignoring—which rested 257on him for nearly two centuries, even they have for the most part lain under that curious fear of Boileau which we shall have to notice so often. Chapelain: the hopelessness of his verse. Sainte-Beuve (who knew his French seventeenth century as no other man ever has known, or probably ever will know it, and who had in his own possession the MS. Letters which do Chapelain not a little credit) takes a kind of apologetic tone on the subject, and seems never to have made up his mind to treat Chapelain as a whole. It is, indeed, only on the prose side that he can be approached without fear of disaster. There are good things even in the Pucelle, but they are ill to win. You may read Le Moyne, Desmarets, Saint-Amant, not without satisfaction of the true poetic sort, especially in the first case. I think I once got through some part of Scudéry’s Alaric. But the Pucelle has a double touch-me-not-ishness—of niaiserie, and of what Boileau (for once justly) calls “hardness”; there is something really impregnable about her. And the minor pieces—fine as is the Richelieu Ode in parts—hardly save their captainess.

Chapelain as a critic is quite another person. He still writes somewhat heavily: and (among his other faithfulnesses to the Pléiade[316]) goes in the teeth of Malherbe and Vaugelas by his use of classicised words. The interest of his criticism. But he almost deserves the name of the first properly equipped critic of France in point of knowledge: and (shocking as the statement may appear) I am not sure that he was not the last, till almost within the memory of an aged man. Not only did he know Italian literature thoroughly—that was not in his time uncommon for Frenchmen—and Spanish—that also was not far to seek—but he was accurately drilled in the theory and practice of Italian criticism. He is constantly referring to it in his correspondence with Balzac; he (that is to say, the transparently identical author of the main part at least of the Censure of the Cid) not merely rests his objections on these 258critics, but refers to the controversies over the Gerusalemme and the Pastor Fido, as he does elsewhere to that between Castelvetro and Caro. Above all, he, almost alone of his time, knew old French literature. It has not been noticed, I think, either by M. Feillet, who published, or by M. Bourgoin, who discusses, his most interesting and remarkable dialogue, Sur la Lecture des Vieux Romans, that his devotion to Lancelot was almost certainly one of his debts to Ronsard. For the Prince of Poets, as we saw, expressly enjoined the reading of Lancelot and the other romances in order to enrich the vocabulary.

The blot on Chapelain’s critical record in the general estimation is, of course, his[317] Censure of the Cid above referred to. The Sentiments de l’Académie sur le Cid. Even those who admit that critical like other thought is free, and that a critic is not to be sentenced to Malebolge because he is unfortunate enough not to like the great work of a great man, must acknowledge a certain striking poetical justice in the spectacle of the censor of the Cid, for want of correctness, being pitilessly flogged thirty years later by a correcter than he. Nor, nowadays, do we admit much excuse in the undoubted fact that this censure was practically forced on the Academy, and on Chapelain, by the sordid jealousy of Richelieu.

But even in this censure it is possible, even for one who frankly puts Corneille at the head of all French Tragedy, to acknowledge some critical merits. The first (not perhaps quite the least) of these is that it is strictly civil; the second is that, meticulous, purblind, peddling, prudish—a score of similar epithets if you please—as it is, it does adopt an intelligible code of critical judgment, and does apply that code with legal propriety. Moreover, as we have seen, it is quite a mistake to represent this code as being invented for the occasion—suddenly 259foisted upon France to gratify the envy of Scudéry and Mairet, or the less excusable malignity of Richelieu. The code had been growing for more than a century; it had been gaining wider and wider acquiescence every day; the protests against it, however gallantly made, had fallen practically unheard. Eight years before we have Ogier explicitly admitting it as the code of nos critiques—as the accepted opinion. We may be fully entitled—some of us intend, for us and for our house, to do so, whether entitled or not—to hold the Unities things vainly invented in two cases, and mischievous, if exclusively and universally enforced, in the third.[318] We may think the objections to Corneille’s diction hypercritical, and the objection to Chimène’s conduct utterly absurd.[319] But Chapelain, and those about Chapelain, were also quite entitled to think differently, and there is no reason to believe their opinion feigned, though they might not have put it so forcibly save to curry favour with the Cardinal. After all, Corneille hardly disputed their verdict except in detail; and, whether luckily or unluckily, tried to do as they told him afterwards.

Chapelain’s other critical exercises are numerous: they are quite interesting, and there ought to be some accessible collection of them, for at present they have to be hunted up in half-a-dozen different books or collections, some of them very hard to get at. Prefaces. It is probable, though disputed, that he wrote the Introduction to a translation of Guzman d’Alfarache, which may have been done in his twentieth year, and in which the author (according to the Pléiade view) by no means magnifies his office as translator. He certainly wrote, some years later, the prefatory panegyric to Marini’s Adone, 260where he practises, in a fashion familiar to students of Italian criticism, an elaborate scholastic division of kinds and qualities, with definitions and connections of them. Sur les Vieux Romans. We need not trouble ourselves with his Academic discourse, against Love and for Glory, which is full of précieuse personification, but pass to his most interesting works, the Dialogue on the Romances and the critical Letters. In the first[320] he maintains the case of the Arthurian romances against Ménage and Sarrasin, not with a thorough-going championship (that would be wholly anachronistic), but with singular sense, knowledge, and even, as far as it goes, appreciation. He does not affect to admire the composition or the style in Lancelot. But he knows something of the origin (it is extraordinary that he allows it to be, in part at least, English). He will not allow that, barring style and expression, there is any necessary gulf between Lancelot and Homer (wherein he is a hundred years ahead in sense of Blair, who was a hundred years ahead of him in time), delights (taught to do so, as we said, by Ronsard) in the vocabulary, and feels and rejoices in the point of honour (“la crainte perpetuelle qu’ils ont de rien faire et de rien dire dont leur reputation puisse souffrir la moindre tache”),[321] their jealousy of their word, their devotion (so different from “our galanterie”) to their ladies. Quia multum amavit! Moreover, the document is connected in a rather fascinating manner with another,[322] in which the same interlocutors, with others, appear, which refers to it, and in which not only does Sarrasin confess that he had been brought by Chapelain to a state of mind different from that which is to be seen in his Discours noticed below, but Chapelain himself reinforces his argument with a long citation from, and discussion of, an episode in Perceforest—that huge and interesting romance which is almost inaccessible to modern readers, in consequence of the depraved persistence 261of modern scholars and Societies in reprinting the same text in idle emulation of each other, instead of giving what are practically anecdota.

The Letters (published, with some omissions, by M. Tamizey de la Roque in 1880, and supplemented fourteen years later by some more in the Transactions of a learned Society[323]) are crammed with references to books, and contain not a little real criticism. Letters, &c. And lastly, the famous list[324] of characterisations of French men of letters which Chapelain drew up for Colbert’s use in allotting pensions, though it has been laughed at in parts, is for its date (some of its subjects, including Molière, had not yet done anything like their best work) as sound, as sensible, and, at the same time, as benevolent a hand-list of the kind as you shall discover in the records of the centuries.

On the whole we may say that Chapelain only wanted the proverbial “That!” to make a good and perhaps a really great critic. Not all, though a good deal, of the deficiency must be put down to the transition character of time, taste, literary diction, and everything, in midst of which he found himself. The point of critical genius, the ability to grasp and focus and methodise, must have been wanting too. But he had knowledge, both of literature and of criticism; he had obviously catholic, if not unerring, sympathies; he had acuteness and penetration, if not quite combination and the architectonic; and he was entirely free from that ill-nature which, while it may seem to assist the critic, really disables him. Critique manqué, perhaps, on the whole; but still on his day a critic and no mean one.

“Il faut observer l’Unité d’action, de lieu et de jour. Personne n’en doute.” But, out of France at least, and perhaps in it, it is possible that few people may know, or even doubt, whence this saying comes. Corneille. It would be an insult to a Frenchman of letters to tell him that it comes from Pierre Corneille; long, it is true, after the debate over the Cid, but nearly a quarter of a century before the close of his glorious, 262if not too happy, life. It may be gathered—rather from a long and large induction than from any single utterance of a person of importance—that the French do not think very much of Corneille as a critic; it may be further gathered from this that a man should never submit his genius. Tu contra audentior ito is the counsel of wisdom. He has written much the best things that have been written in favour of the “correct” theory; but its partisans (and small blame to them) suspect him. They see the eyes of Chimène behind the mask, and they distrust them—wisely also after their kind.

But we must not rhapsodise here on the admirable poetry of this great poet, and the way in which the critics not merely, as somebody said in his own day, ont tari sa veine, but made him in a way false to it. We have only to do with his actual criticism; and whatever view we take of the general question, it must be here pronounced great criticism of its kind. The three Discours, and the series of Examens which appeared first in 1660, present an almost unique, an extremely touching, and (to men of English birth) a rather incomprehensible instance of a man of supreme genius crouching and curbing himself to obey the tendency of the time and the dictates of “the wits.”[325] We are not kneaded of this dough. We cannot even conceive Shakespeare taking a copy of Sidney or going to Ben, and afterwards constructing dramas as regularly as he could, or apologising for their irregularity; Milton adjusting Paradise Lost to Dryden’s views of rhyme; nay, even Dryden himself (who is in some ways, as we shall see, very close to Corneille) “looking first at the stop-watch” in any way. But “things are as they are,” and (a great saying from which sometimes the wrong inference has been drawn) “their consequences will be what they will be.”

The three Discourses, “De l’Utilité et des parties du Poëme Dramatique,” “De la Tragédie,” and “Des Trois Unités,” and the Examens of the different plays, are the result of this submission.[326] 263The Three Discourses. Let us say at once that it is in no sense the mere submission of a man who recants, either with tongue in cheek or simply under fear of rack and gallows and fire. Corneille (and this is the interesting point of the French temperament as contrasted with the English) is really affected by authority, and by the Zeitgeist. He has been honestly converted; indeed he asserts (and we may believe him to a great extent) that he never needed conversion—it was only his green unknowing age that made him go wrong. In the three Discourses he examines the question with plentiful quotations from Aristotle, with some knowledge of Italians like Castelvetro and Beni and Pazzi (Pacius) as well as of Heinsius. He is quite aware of the weak points of the ancients; he repeats, though he does not much dwell upon, the earlier comments on the singular rapidity with which Agamemnon[327] follows the beacon-fires, the astonishing patness of the turning up of the Corinthian in the Œdipus. And to any one who thinks little of Corneille as a critic I should like to prescribe the reading, marking, and inwardly digesting of his remarks in the Discours des Trois Unités on the separation of acts and scenes, and the relation of the chorus to orchestral interludes. Elsewhere we may find the mark of the chain: as where the poet, pretending indifference, is evidently rather unhappy because he cannot tell exactly what the wicked Queen in Rodogune (which some have thought his best play next to the Cid) was doing when she was not on the stage. This inquiry is of itself almost sufficient to show the sheer idiocy to which this kind of criticism is always on the point of descending. But on the whole, and since Giant Unity has long ceased even to gnash at the pilgrims, we can tolerate it.

The Examens are of still greater importance; for we have had plenty of inquiries in general into the qualities and requirements of Kinds, though few from persons like Corneille. The Examens. The system of elaborate critical reviews—for 264that is what it comes to—of his past work, by a great poet who has taken pains to acquaint himself with critical method, and is almost too respectful of its utterances, is practically a new one. There is a certain flavour of it in Spenser and Ronsard, much more than a flavour in Tasso; but it was not till the seventeenth century, when the critic was abroad in earnest, that it could be done on such a scale as this. For Corneille, though he never issued any Examens till 1660, applied them to all but his very latest plays. To the mere general reader they may be rendered distasteful by the elaborate and most pathetic pains which Corneille takes to adjust himself to the theories which his reason docilely accepted, but to which his faith was always secretly recalcitrant. To the student of him, and to the student of criticism, they must always have a great attraction.

But for the latter, if he have but a little of the “rascally comparative” spirit, they have an attraction greater still. There is no doubt at all that they served as pattern, at a very brief interval, to the critical exercises of Dryden, and thereby opened a way which criticism is treading still. And there is more in them besides this accidental and extrinsic attraction. Corneille, though he really shows extraordinary impartiality as well as great acumen in his examinations, was by the mere force of nature driven to stick close to his actual work, to observe it narrowly, if only so as to put the best face on it. And, as we have seen, the great fault both of ancient and of mediæval criticism was the omission or the refusal to consider individual works of art minutely and exactly—the constant breaking off and escape to the type. The natural partiality of authors for their own work has not always been fortunate in its results. Here it was so.

Although we have had, and shall have, to question the exact importance assigned by some to the Cid quarrel, there can be no doubt that it had a very important influence, extending far beyond the chief parties concerned, and helping, very particularly, that popularisation of criticism which is undoubtedly the work of France in general, and of the French Academy in particular. La Mesnardière—Sarrasin—Scudéry. In the years almost immediately succeeding it we have, for 1639, the 265Discours de la Tragédie of the ingenious and ill-fated Sarrasin, for 1640 the formal Art Poétique of La Mesnardière, a treatise specially dealing with tragedy, strongly, almost idolatrously, Aristotelian in tone, and characterised by a lively polemic against the Spanish and Italian influences which had been so powerful for a generation in France. Scudéry followed up the pamphlets which had actually given occasion to the Cid dispute, almost at the same period, with the Preface to Ibrahim, as well as years afterwards in that to Alaric. Nay, it was at this very time (about 1640) that the world was at least threatened with the birth of the dullest critical treatise of the century, that of Hédelin, though a respite of seventeen years was actually granted.

La Mesnardière had evidently made a careful study of the Italian critics. His very format—a handsome small quarto—reminds one of their favourite shape, and contrasts curiously with the tiny duodecimos of the sixteenth-century French critics. And he puts forth his whole strength in arguing for the Stagirite against the blasphemies of Castelvetro, whom, however, he declares that he honours hors des intérêts d’Aristote—an odd, but very characteristic, way of putting it. La Mesnardière, who follows out all the Aristotelian divisions, even to Music (with engraved airs), is equally odd and equally representative in identifying, or at least associating in his first Chapter, Politesse with “Imagination.” Mere Understanding will make a Philosopher—the Poet must be polished up into an Imaginative condition. He does not neglect language and diction: and though he devotes himself to drama, illustrates copiously from non-dramatic poetry, and criticises his illustrations in the way which was becoming so common and is so important. But a specimen passage in a footnote[328] will explain, better than pages of discussion, the fatally parasitic character of most of his criticism.

The Sarrasin and Scudéry documents are complementary as well as complimentary of this and of each other. For Sarrasin’s 266Discours[329] is devoted to Scudéry’s Amour Tyrannique, which is so perfect that Aristotle would have put it in the Poetics, instead of or beside the Œdipus, if he had only known it. And La Mesnardière is just going (see dates given) to write “divinely” on that art of poetry which those great men, Ronsard and Du Bellay, did not know, and therefore recommended the study of Romances.[330] Finally, “Armand” [Richelieu, of course] is le Dieu tutélaire des lettres. As for the great Georges de Scudéry himself, his Prefaces to Ibrahim and Alaric are quite worthy of the “Commander of the Fort of Notre Dame de La Garde and Kept-Captain to the King,” whose portrait guards the entrance of the stately folio of Alaric. That is to say, they are an odd mixture of bombast (he leads off that to this book with a list of critics and poets, all of whom he has read), crotchet, and real wits. Both are worth comparing with Davenant’s to Gondibert (v. infra, p. 367), which came between them.[331]

Some years later the uncompromising Aristotelianism of La Mesnardière as to the Drama was continued and straitened yet further, in reference to the Epic, by Pierre Mambrun,[332] who was, like so many others of these French seventeenth-century critics, a Jesuit. Mambrun. His principles (which he illustrated later by a Constantinus sive De Idolatria debellata) exhibit the French detestation of compromise in the 267most agreeable light: whether his practice does not also illustrate the non-epic character of the French head is another matter. Aristotle, and the whole Aristotle, so far as the Poetics go, is Mambrun’s motto; if he cannot add “nothing but Aristotle,” that is merely because his text is admittedly meagre as to Epic. But he does what he can. He has read Scaliger and Voss, and has a proper respect for them as learned men, but he is shocked at both for their worshipping of idols—at Scaliger for wasting time on diction and metre, as well as for falling foul of Homer, at Voss for making the persons instead of the action the centre of Epic. On the other hand, the too famous Petronian passage is to him a kind of inspired postscript to the Poetics. In his handling of Poetry, which for him is first of all Epic Poetry, he is scholastic as to the frame. The Material cause is Action; the Formal cause the Fable; the Efficient cause a combination of Prudentia and Furor Poeticus; the Final Cause not pleasure but the making of statesmen. In all these respects Homer and Virgil are perfect—Statius, Lucan, Ariosto, Tasso, sinners. The former always observe the Unity, the Integrity, the Magnitude of the Action. Mambrun has satisfied himself that the Action of the Odyssey only includes fifty-five days—on which principle one would cheerfully undertake to write an Arthuriad, to include the whole of Malory and more, on an “action” of the time between Agravaine’s detection of Lancelot with the Queen and the last fight in Lyonnesse. He thinks that a woman may be a heroine of tragedy but cannot be of Epic (which seems unkind to Chapelain). He admits that to distinguish between the Action and the Fable is not easy; that even in Aristotle the two are sometimes identical. But properly the Fable is actio culta et ornata, and he has an ingenious receipt for stripping the matter of episodes and names. Epic is not Art, not Logic, not History; it is “Prudentia.” But Furor Poeticus? Mambrun’s section of Furor Poeticus is by far the most interesting in his book. He distinguishes first the Kinds of Fury. Then he points out that the Epic Poet must not be furious in constituting his fable. Very much the reverse. “But in episodes and descriptions and speeches I shall not 268deny that a little fury may be sprinkled in”[333]—the fury-dredger, or poetic cruet, being thus authoritatively established as an implement of the Bard. Nor does he conceal the process. The poet thinks very hard about an episode, a description, &c. Then the black bile warms itself, flies up, inflames the brain, and the poet is poetically furious. But in another memorable passage, “being strong in black bile will not necessarily make you a poet.”[334] [Alas! it will not.] There must be discipline, &c. In short, the book is a precious one.

There are few critics—not such by profession, and not precisely of the very highest rank—who, from the very first, and with an unbroken record, have enjoyed such a reputation as has been constantly maintained by Saint-Evremond.[335] Saint-Evremond. Nor is there, perhaps, a single one who has better deserved this constancy on the part of the great inconstants, Time and Fortune. He was commended to his own time scarcely more by birth and station as a fine gentleman and soldier, or by his singular political and personal history, than by the admirable quality of his writing; to the eighteenth century by his touches of scepticism and libertinage; to the Romantic revival by his championship of Corneille against Racine, and by the frondeur spirit which made him resist the tyranny of the classical creed. But it is also true that he has purely critical qualities of a very uncommon kind. It is perhaps a testimony to that spice of universal in him which has been noticed, that the particular stamp to be put on these qualities—the particular class to which Saint-Evremond is to be referred—is not quite matter of agreement among those who fully agree as to his general merits. To M. Bourgoin, for instance, his critical spirit seems to be nearer to that of Boileau 269and the critics of rule than to that of Fénelon, or even La Bruyère, and the critics of impression and sens propre. To me the approximation seems to be in the other direction.

The acute and learned author of Les Maîtres de la Critique has, I think, been a little deceived by superficial characteristics of form and method. His critical quality and accomplishment. A young man of twenty at the date of the Cid, and the battle over it, Saint-Evremond, fine gentleman as he was, no more forgot the forms of the quarrel than the attractions of the play. He has something a little scholastic, something of the earlier century, in his manner. Perhaps the best piece of criticism which he has left us—the Dissertation sur le mot “vaste”—recalls the known or alleged subjects of the earlier conversations of Malherbe and Racan, and their fellows, the later of Vaugelas and Chapelain and the young Academy. We have a formal Jugement sur Senèque, Plutarque, et Pétrone, a quite academic study of Alexandre le Grand, discussions of the character of tragedy generally, and the like. But the accomplished, agile, and independent spirit of the author is perpetually escaping from the restraints of his forms and models, and taking its own way according to its own taste. Perhaps, indeed, the fatal equivocation or ambiguity which seems to beset so many critical terms has worked here also: for to the present day the word “Taste” seems to excite quite dissimilar ideas in different minds. To some (as to Boileau and his followers it certainly did) it seems to suggest an antecedent law, a bar to which subjects are to be brought, something to which it is almost improper to apply the terms “good” or “bad,” because there is only one taste, and anything else is not taste at all but untaste. In this sense, though he might not have allowed it, I do not think that Saint-Evremond ever judged by “taste.” In the other—where taste means the approbation and satisfaction of a competent judge, well-gifted, well-tried, and taking pains to keep his palate clean—I think he always judged by it. That he often gave reasons for his judgment is nothing; one should almost always do that. But one should always also remember that these reasons may be totally inapplicable to the next instance.

270Saint-Evremond, we have said, was a great admirer of Corneille, and a steady champion of him against Racine. His admiration has been set down to the mere “fallacy of first love,” as we may call it—the fact that the youth of the poet and the youth of the critic had coincided. His views on Corneille. This is not fair. Inviolable constancy to first loves is not precisely the chief thing in an Epicurean temperament. Saint-Evremond, in his various utterances on the subject, makes it perfectly clear why he preferred the older to the younger poet; and Cornelians and Racinians alike must agree that, whether his conclusions were right or wrong, his considerations were at any rate genuine and adequate. The variety and vigour of the one as opposed to the somewhat monotonous mould and soft (or, as some said, “creeping”) sentiment of the other, form a real difference: and so throughout.

On what was then a burning subject—one which cannot be said to have been quite put out, though its ashes only smoulder—the suitableness of religious and especially Christian subjects for epic and drama, &c., Saint-Evremond’s opinion is a little tainted by his undoubted “philosophy,” to use the word which had already become fashionable for the various shades of unbelief. On Christian subjects, &c. But either from this cause, or from a general critical spirit, he escapes the inconsistency (in which Boileau for instance is entangled) of contending that the deorum ministeria are capital things in ancient, and very bad things in modern, poetry. His remarks on the theory of Purgation are a little irreverent but by no means irrational; and he makes strong play for the contention (of which, if he did not invent it, he was one of the strongest and most original champions) that “Admiration is a tragic passion” worthy of being seated beside Pity and Terror, and necessary to be kept in sight even when we deal with Love.

In respect of the Ancient and Modern dispute—of all three stages of which, v. infra, his long life made him a contemporary, while he actually took a sort of skirmishing part in the two earlier—his position is distinctly that of a true critic. On Ancients and Moderns. From what has been said already it will be clear that he could not be an out-and-out 271Ancient; but he is as little a Modern of the Perrault type. One sees that the Moderns gave him most pleasure, and in the Ancients whom he really likes, such as Petronius (supposing no merely unworthy motives to have entered into the preference), it is easy to discern the modern element. But in neither case does he “like grossly” and in the lump; he has his reasons and his affinities, and can state both easily. He is even not very far from that “horizontal” view of literature, without deceptive foreshortenings and distances, which is, up to his time, so rare. Nothing is more striking than his remarks on English literature—at least the English drama. Perhaps he did not himself know much English; and something of the kind seems to be insinuated in Dryden’s remarks[336] on the matter, though Dryden was naturally hurt at the selection of Shadwell for commendation. But if so he apprehended what Waller and others said to him about Ben Jonson’s comedy with almost miraculous divination, and reflects in his account of our tragedy rather less than the current mistakes on the subject among Englishmen of the Restoration period themselves. And here also, as in his remarks on Spanish and Italian, is noticeable this same horizontal and comparative spirit.

On his treatment of Opera I may be permitted to repeat what I wrote more than twenty years ago, that it really contains the substance of everything that has been said since on the literary side of the matter. As for the “Vaste” dissertation the best thing to say is Tolle, lege. I do not think it possible to have a better example of that rarest of things, literary philology, in the true and not the distorted sense of the substantive. The Academy opined—in fact had opined already (whence much of the salt of the piece)—against Saint-Evremond. But his Dissertation is, like all his criticism more or less, a really extraordinary example of the combination of all that was best in the French academic spirit with freedom from most of its faults. This union of freedom and delicacy, of precision and independent play, is Saint-Evremond’s glory as a critic, and it distinguishes him, not merely from Boileau, but from most others between 1660 and 1800. Addison had (and 272no doubt directly borrowed) something of the same touch; Fénelon, in a different spirit, had a great deal: we shall find something of it in Gravina. But it is very rare in the period, and it is precisely the absence of it as a “compensation balance” which vitiates neo-classic criticism as a whole.

It is common, if not universal, to glance at the redoubtable and satiric doctor, Gui Patin, as at least an outlier among French seventeenth-century critics; but the reader who, as Matthew Arnold says, “wants criticism” will not find much of it in his very amusing Letters.[337] Gui Patin—his judgment of Browne. An English reader may be specially disappointed because he is most likely to know the surprising, the repeated, the, to all appearance, fully genuine, and the very felicitous remarks[338] of Patin on the Religio Medici. A Frenchman who can appreciate Browne, who can see in the Religio a book not merely tout gentil et curieux but fort délicat et tout mystique, who can perceive its étranges et ravissantes pensées, who can pronounce il n’y a guère encore de livre de la sorte (alas! we may drop the guère and continue the encore), who can describe the author as a mélancolique agréable en ses pensées, who can say of his stupid commentators ce livre n’a pas besoin de tels écoliers, and even desire ardently to be acquainted with Sir Kenelm Digby’s reply—may seem to have handed in his credentials as a critic once and for all. But one soon finds that Patin’s interest in Browne was, first of all, esprit de corps (which was perhaps stronger in the Faculty of that time than in any profession of any other), and secondly, a certain coincidence of true but unconventional piety, different as were its forms in the two. Elsewhere Patin is a collector, an eager student of new books, a scholar even, with a conviction that Scaliger and Casaubon were “the two first men of their time,” and that Salmasius was a “grand héros des belles lettres”; but not a critic, and with a distinctly limited idea of belles lettres themselves. He speaks contemptuously of Descartes, he barely mentions Corneille. He was, in fact, generally too angry with antimony, opium, quinine, the English, and Mazarin, or else too 273much rapt in ecstasy at the divine powers of bleeding and purging,[339] to have time to think of poetry, or even of prose.

Nor can we afford much space to the main body of the Academicians, of the frequenters of “the” Hotel (par excellence), of the abbés, and marquis, and even marquises who crowd the middle of the seventeenth-century history of France, not disagreeably for posterity. Tallemant, Pellisson, Ménage, Madame de Sévigné. They must be sought in Tallemant (himself, as citations will have shown, interested in the matter, and not inept at it) as a main and single preserver, in a hundred other places, original and second-hand, from the contemporary records to the essays of Sainte-Beuve and his followers. We could fill this volume with them without the slightest difficulty; but, as in all true history, they must “speak by their foremen,” and even these foremen cannot have much place. The modest and amiable Pellisson, the historian of the Academy, whose personal ugliness Boileau had the insolent vulgarity to satirise,[340] but who had a “soul of gold,” was by no means a bad though a too amiable critic, and had the sense and courage not to deny Ronsard when the fashion turned against him, just as he clove to Fouquet when it was positively, and even extremely, dangerous to do so. Ménage, to whom his own unguardedness and the satire of Molière[341] have given something of a ridiculous position in literary history, had the wit to see the merit of Molière himself quite early, possessed very wide reading, and could make judicious reflections on it, had studied the Italian critics,[342] and could now and then (as in the brief obituary notice of Scarron[343]) hit off his stroke extremely well. As for Marie de Sévigné, adorable to all, and especially adored by these two, she is generally right, and always illustrates the 274saying of La Bruyère, which is quoted below, whether she is right or not. But her critical position is so close to that of Saint-Evremond that what we have said of him is almost equally applicable to her, though she invests the critical attitude with her own peculiar charm.

With one remarkable exception as almost a whole, and a certain number of scattered passages in some of them,[344] the most noteworthy thing in the other Ana, which has relation to Criticism, is the almost invariable connotation of the word in them. The Ana other than Ménage’s, especially Vigneul-Marville,[345] noticing a book, says that there are in it deux remarques de critique, one that Myconos is not so far from Delos as Ferrari says, being only two leagues instead of seven, and the other, that somebody else is wrong in saying that it belongs to the Venetians since it is in the power of the Turks. Of course in a sense these are “critical” observations; but one is a little reminded of Hegel and philosophical instruments. More unmistakable is the clear definition given by the author of the book above excepted. Huet (p. 232 ed. cit.) says explicitly that Critique is “that part of grammar which busies itself with re-establishing the text of ancient authors in its first integrity, and purging out changes due to ignorance,” &c. This, he goes on to say, is the art which Aristotle is said to have invented; and yet, further, he frankly declares that he himself has always looked on it as “a mean business.”[346] Yet, not merely in the well-known De l’Origine des Romans, which is not unfrequently found in connection with the Huetiana, but in these themselves, he shows that he had no mean conception 275of the higher and nobler branches of the Art. His remarks on the Quarrel[347] are among the most sensible that we have, as was to be expected from a man who was at once an excellent scholar in ancient, and a warm admirer of modern, literature. If he is less wise on rhyme,[348] let us remember that this is parcius objiciendum to a contemporary, although a younger contemporary, of Milton; and if he is responsible for the astonishing statement[349] that Greek poetry “a toujours décliné depuis Homère,” let us simply decline the attempt to construct any critical theodolite which will show us this line of constant declension through Sappho and Pindar, Æschylus and Aristophanes, Theocritus and the best of the Anthologists. the Huetiana. On the other hand, the assertion advanced in the Origine des Romans, and defended in the Ana, to the effect that a good judge of poetry is even rarer than a good poet, is too double-edged, in its apparent flattery of our own office, for us to make any difficulty in applauding it, while the defence itself is singularly good. The everlasting comparison of Virgil to Theocritus and Homer has seldom been better handled than by Huet. Indeed the whole book is worth reading for the critical passages it contains. The Traité des Romans is a little discursively and promiscuously erudite, and Huet is thinking too much of the bastard romance of his own time, too little of the true-bred romances of old: but he knows something even of these, and he is well acquainted with the attempts of Cinthio and Pigna in the previous century to make good at least the Italian form of the kind.

Valesiana,

In the Valesiana—amid much that is merely antiquarian or linguistic, and a fair though not excessive portion of the mere gossip and gabble which first made these things read and afterwards brought them into disrepute—there will be found a curious passage on the Latin hymns and their prosody, showing how dead the ear falls at certain times to the music of others, and the more curious selection of Palingenius and his Zodiacus Vitæ as a poem and a poet worth the pains of reading. Nor will the reputation for robustness of seventeenth-century erudition suffer from the patronising commendation of 276Baillet’s Jugements des Savants as a book which would be useful light reading for the giddy youth of the day who declined serious study. Scaligerana, Yet Scaliger himself (J. J., not J. C.), according to the collection[350] standing in his name (a quaint mosaic or macaronic of French and Latin), thought that nobody save Casaubon (and “another that shall be nameless,” no doubt) was really learned as men had been a hundred years earlier. He is himself nearly as untrustworthy on really critical points as his father, and had, I think, less true critical spirit. But he makes some amends for Julius Cæsar’s truculent assault on the Ciceronianus by confessing that Longolius (the main object of the Erasmian satire) could not really be said to write in Ciceronian style when he simply fitted Ciceronian phrases together.

Another member of the group to be noted very especially is the so-called Parrhasiana,[351] in the title of which “Théodore Parrhase” stands for a nom de guerre of the industrious pressman Jean Le Clerc. and Parrhasiana. It has very little in common with its class, being in part a reasoned treatise on general points of criticism, in part a defence of the author’s own works against the injurious remarks of Meibomius and others. The latter we can neglect; the former contains a really interesting exposition of general critical views by one of the most experienced of the new class of professional critics and reviewers at the junction of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The distinction of the Parrhasiana is that it has so little distinction—that it is so thoroughly normal. Le Clerc is a thorough believer in the Ancients; but he wears his rue with this difference, that he does not believe in moderns who write Greek and Latin Verses, and that he is quite handsome and encouraging to those who do write in their mother tongue. They may be quite, or almost, as useful, he thinks—but as for 277reading for mere amusement, that is not a serious occupation. And Le Clerc is uncompromising in the prosaism of his views on poetry. In fact, I am not sure that there is anywhere else so naïf a confession of belief in the Lower Reason only. He finds improbabilities and absurdities, not merely in Homer, but in Virgil himself; he holds æternum servans sub pectore vulnus, which some not very fervid Maronites would admit as a great and poetic phrase, to be a mere surplusage; and he actually condoles with poets on the unlucky necessity under which they lie of inversions, metaphors, and so forth, metri gratia. I do not know whether Mr Arnold knew the Parrhasiana, and indeed should doubt it; but he certainly might have found chapter and verse for his strictures on the age of “prose and sense” almost anywhere in it.

Yet other groups or individuals in this abounding period might receive notice if this history were to be in twelve volumes instead of in three. Patru, Desmarets, and others. There is Patru, not merely in his time the glory of the French bar, but extolled, by Boileau and by his enemies alike, as a sort of Quintilian and Quintilius in one[352]—as a standard at once of style and of judgment. Yet his long life and his constant occupation with literature, in talk and in reading, seem to have left us hardly anything in the shape of written criticism. There is Desmarets de Saint-Sorlin, a less belauded but more interesting and perhaps more genuine man of letters. Not merely did Desmarets compose the epics ridiculed by Boileau, not merely was he the author of the excellent Visionnaires (the best comedy in French before Molière except Corneille’s Le Menteur), not merely was he a “visionary” himself in his latter days, and a versifier, if not a poet, always, but he was a not inconsiderable critic. Those who choose to read his Défense du Poème Héroique[353] will find in it by no means the imbecility that they may expect, either in the dialogues defending the Christian poem, or in the somewhat meticulous, but sharp and not ill-deserved, “cutting-up” of Boileau which follows. But these, and much more the 278Conrarts and the Costars, the Maucroix, and the rest[354] must here be as silencieux as the first in his stock epithet. And one may confess even to doubts whether, with the amplest room and verge, they ought to have much space in a general History of Criticism as distinguished from one of special countries and periods. Hardly any of them is more than one of a numerus; hardly any has himself actual distinction, as persons of much inferior talents may have at other times. The Historian of Climate must have much to say about the delightful variety of that phenomenon which the British Isles display, about its causes, its phases, and the like, in general; but he would be lost, and would lose his readers in more than one sense, if he were to attempt to describe every shower or even every wet season.[355]

The attempts, not merely to make out a regular Æsthetic for Descartes, but to key this on to the great critical movement of the century, will be best dealt with later; but the greatest of the Cartesians must have a word.

279Malebranche need not occupy us long; indeed, this great philosopher and admirable master of French has to be dealt with by us, at least in some part, because he has been dealt with by others. Malebranche. The invitation to do so, if we may say it without illiberality, seems to have consisted rather in the titles than in the contents of his work. The Second Book of the Recherche de la Vérité is, indeed, “De l’Imagination”; the Second Part of this Second Book has much to do with les personnes d'étude; and the Third, Fourth, and Fifth chapters of the Third Part deal with “the imagination of certain authors,” especially Tertullian, Seneca, and Montaigne. But we have seen, and shall see, how treacherous the word Imagination is, and how people will misunderstand it, however frankly they are dealt with. Malebranche, as he always is, is quite frank and quite clear; he tells us definitely that imagination for him is “a little more and a little less than sense,” that it only consists in the power possessed by the soul of forming images of objects for itself. His quarrel with the “persons of study” is that they will read, write, and argue about the ancients, instead of recurring to primary truths; and when he deals with his three selected authors, it is not to criticise them from the literary point of view (though he finds fault with “irregular movements” in Tertullian’s figures), but to object to the paralogism of the De Pallio, the ill-regulated imagination and feeble reasoning of Seneca, the treacherous “cavalier” manner, the “criminal attraction born of concupiscence,” the disguised pedantry, the vanity, in Montaigne. Phrases here and there, in his own perfect style[356] (I doubt whether any prose writer of the grand siècle can give points to Malebranche), show what a critic was lost in him; but the critic—as indeed we should expect, and as is quite proper—is lost in the philosopher, the theologian, and the moralist.[357]

And so to Boileau.

280It is desirable that we should examine Boileau’s critical work[358] with more than ordinary care. The history of Boileau’s reputation. The history of his reputation has, until recently, been on the whole not very different from that of many other eminent men of letters—that is to say, it has oscillated between extravagant reverence (during the entire eighteenth century, with rare exceptions, both in France and elsewhere) and a violent reaction (when the Romantic movement set in). Pope and Voltaire may stand as spokesmen of the former period; Keats and the men of 1830 of the latter. But of late years, and in England as well as in France, the cant of criticism (which is as protean, and as immortal, as most such Duessas) has devised another thing. Even in the extreme Romantic time, true critics, especially Sainte-Beuve, had recognised how germane, in wrong as in right, the taste and temper of Boileau were to the taste and temper of literary France generally, and to some extent of the Latin peoples old and new. But latterly, under the powerful influence of M. Ferdinand Brunetière—whom, though I often disagree with him, I always name for the sake of most unaffected honour, and as a critic of whom any country and time might have been proud—this tendency has gone much further, and we are even asked to accept Monsieur Nicolas as an adequate representative of the French literary genius. Let us remember what “adequate” means; it means to a great, at least, if not to the very fullest, extent commensurate, coextensive, and complete. And in England also there has been not wanting an affectation of deference to this estimate—of arguing that we ought to let the French know best in such points—that it is wicked, rude, uncritical, to intrude English judgment into such matters.

So be it, for the moment, and for the sake of argument. Let us then, as we do always, as from this point of view it is more 281specially necessary that we should do, inquire what the actual criticism of this “adequate” representative of the French genius is. The Art Poétique. And in doing this let us begin with the Art Poétique, that elaborately arranged code of neo-classic correctness, the composition of which occupied half the central decade[359] of its author’s life when he was in the full vigour of ripe age, which summed up all the doctrine of his earlier satires, and is practically repeated by most of his later.

In making the examination we shall (not without considerable generosity) abstain from bearing too hardly upon the flagrant ignorance of literary history, even in his own country, which Boileau here displays. Its false literary history. His modern defenders (not, it must be confessed, till those who do not defend him had made uncompromising championship on this point impossible) practically confess and avoid it, pass it with a half-petulant “Agreed!” They cannot well do otherwise: for in the famous lines (I. 113-130) from

“Durant les premiers ans du Parnasse Français,”

to

“Rendit plus retenus Desportes et Bertaut,”

an amount of crass ignorance, or of impudent falsification, is amassed which is really curious, and almost creditable, at least to the audacity of the author’s party-spirit, or the serenity of his indifference. Even in the oldest French poetry that we possess, much more in the Roman de la Rose (which he adduces in a note, having obviously never read it), the “words” were not “arranged without measure”; there were “strict numbers”; and there was even a pretty strict cæsura. Villon did not do anything to “the art of the old romancers,” but wrote in precisely the same measures as men had written in for a hundred and fifty years before him. Marot simply adopted ballades, wrote no triolets, did nothing new to rondeaux, while we are only unable to convict Boileau of error as to mascarades, because 282nobody has yet discovered what, exactly, a mascarade is. The description of Ronsard’s action is rubbish: while it is quite certain that both Desportes and Bertaut went to their graves without the slightest doubt that he was Prince of French poets, and were not in the least “restrained” in following him. And the history of the French Drama in Canto Three only deserves less reprehension because it was really not very easy at the time for a man to know much about it.

But let this suffice. And let us also exercise our perhaps undeserved generosity on another point, that wholesale and unblushing imitation of Horace which made the Abbé Cotin, one of Boileau’s victims, retort with as much truth as wit, in the very form of one of Despréaux' own insolences—

“J’appelle Horace Horace—et Boileau traducteur.”[360]

After all, though a paradox, it is not an impossibility, that a man should be a great critic and yet most untrustworthy on literary history, and apt to make his own work, in great part, a mere mosaic of the work of others.

Let us then take the Art Poétique simply as criticism—not as a series of statements of fact, not as an original or a borrowed argument—and see how it looks this way. Abstract of it. The first Canto begins (in the teasing inverted style[361] which was one of Boileau’s worst legacies to French poetry, and which itself was a “corrupt following” of Latin) with a declaration of the necessity of genius, which has been counted to him for much righteousness. Everybody has not the genius for everything, and it does not follow that because you have a genius for convivial songs you have one for Epic. But good sense and reason are as necessary as genius. Indeed we are soon told that writing depends on these alone for its value: so that genius is like those tickets of admission which are quite useless till they are countersigned by somebody other than 283the issuer. Never try high flights or conceits. Do not describe your subjects or objects too minutely. Cultivate variety, but never be “low,” burlesque, or bombastic. Whatever you do, mind cæsura and avoid hiatus. Then follows the pseudo-history referred to above, capped by its phrase of Malherbe, in whose steps you are to walk. Clearness of expression is of the greatest value; but as a fact it depends on clearness of thought. Smart things will not ransom faults. If you fear criticism, anticipate it by yourself and your friends; but beware of flatteries, and, above all, do not take the part of your own faults simply because your friends have noticed them. The First Canto ends with the really excellent line, in Boileau’s true vein (for, whatsoe’er the failings on his part as a critic, he was a satirist born and bred)—

“Un sot trouve toujours un plus sot qui l’admire.”

The Second Canto begins, apropos of nothing (indeed Boileau was frankly troubled about his “transitions”), with a discussion, partly metaphorical, of the Idyll, Eclogue, and Pastoral, followed by a similar account of other kinds of shorter pieces—Elegy, Ode, Sonnet, Epigram, and others, down to Vaudeville—the Fable being absent, to the discomfort and laborious excuse-making of the disciples. The Idyll must be neither too pompous nor too trivial: follow Theocritus and Virgil and all will be right. Elegy is proper for Death and Love; but you must not, in regard to the latter, be frigid and hackneyed. Imitate Tibullus and Ovid, and again all will be right. The ode is worthy of Achilles or Louis; but do not be too historical—which indeed would be difficult in regard to Achilles, and might be inconvenient in regard to Louis. Sonnets are very difficult, but a sonnet without fault is by itself worth an Epic.[362] The epigram may have pointes, which are elsewhere to be utterly rejected. The other 284kinds are lightly treated till the Satire, descending to the vaudeville, has a longer discussion. Satire, the apologist pro domo declares, is the voice of Truth. Lucilius, Horace, Juvenal, are characterised. Regnier is our best man; but his style is antiquated, and his subjects and language are really shocking.[363] Then “the Frenchman, né malin,” made the Vaudeville. It is only fair to Boileau to say that, could he have foreseen the tedious abuse of this mot, he would certainly either have forborne it, or have given us a capital line or couplet to tie to the tail of the culprits. Canto Three passes, with no less abruptness, to the drama, which occupies the first half, the latter part being given to the Epic. Boileau is at first vague. In fact, he does not seem at all thoroughly to have appreciated the Aristotelian doctrine, which in the main he runs up as his flag. Dramatic art in teaching must please and touch, which it may do by exciting pity and terror. Do not make a long and obscure introduction; keep the Unities as you value your dramatic salvation; never be incredible; and let everything contribute to the development of your story.

The Historic Muse reappears, but in such case, as hinted above, that we shall magnanimously abstain from further vengeance on her. If only Boileau had omitted the unhappy note which says that leurs pièces (those of his imaginary pélerins) sont imprimées, thereby suggesting that he had read them! You must have Love: but do not be doucereux; keep the stock characters; do not modernise the ancients; and if you invent a personage let him be constant to himself. The theatre really is very difficult. But Epic is still more so. It depends entirely upon action, upon fable; and in order to make it noble you put in the deorum ministerium.[364] Æneas’ voyage would have been quite an ordinary thing without Juno, and Neptune, and Æolus:—

“C’est là ce qui surprend, frappe, saisit, attache.”[365]

285But the modern deity will not do at all; and devils and angels are worse. Do let us keep our Tritons, our Parcæ, our Pan, and our Charon! If not, in a short time we shall not be able to tie a bandage on the eyes of Themis, or put a balance in her hand![366] Further, be very careful of your names. There was a person once who actually called his hero Childebrand! Minor receipts for handling follow; and then we find ourselves back on the stage with Comedy, as to which Boileau extols Nature, and tells us that Molière would have been the best of comic dramatists—if he had been other than he was.

The Fourth Canto returns to the generalities of the first, and, taking advantage of this wider scope, begins an attack, not unamusing but in very bad taste, on Claude Perrault, architect, doctor, and, like his more celebrated brother Charles, and a third not so well known as either, a champion on the modern side (v. infra). It ends, in accordance with the habits of the age, in an elaborate and rather well-declaimed panegyric of the king, wherein the adroit historiographer supplies an epilogue to the perhaps not quite so adroit critic.

For some lines in the middle Boileau, though constantly returning to the crutch of Horace, does occupy himself with literature. His precepts may be thus summarised. Whatever you are, be not a bad writer, and if you must be, be rather bombastic than cold; but, on the whole, degrees of mediocrity do not much matter. Here the satirist once more comes to the rescue and dictates the (in application insolent,[367] but) intrinsically good couplet—

“Un fou du moins fait rire et peut nous égayer,
Mais un froid écrivain ne sait rien qu’ennuyer.”

Do not pay attention to flatterers (we had heard this before), do not excuse your verses, but keep an open ear for every comment: though you must be careful to separate foolish from wise criticisms. Join the solid and useful to the pleasant. Let your 286morality be of the very first water. You may introduce love; but respect principle and the young person. Do not be jealous of your rivals; do not put literature above its proper place; for heaven’s sake do not endeavour to make profit out of your writings [except by pensions].[368] Be not avaricious, but attend to Reason. If you do, Louis will give you pensions; and you will not have to tremble, like Colletet,[369] for your dinner, which depends on the success of a sonnet. Of this last ignoble gibe (too much imitated, alas! by our own Pope) we need take no further notice; and we shall say nothing more on any of the other points in Boileau which invite unfavourable comment, but are not strictly critical. Let us judge him as a critic only, and first on this piece.

Is it good criticism?

This of course is far too large a question to answer off-hand. Critical examination of it. We must hunt the answer to it by the way of minor questions, such as, Is it original? (the least important but of some importance). If it is not, What does it add to, and how ingeniously and usefully does it apply, the original from which it borrows? What methods does it use? To what extent and in what fashion would a poet adopting it as a manual be qualified for his art? And lastly (though perhaps some minor questions may crop up in our passage), What incidental excellences does it contain? What is the merit of the critical estimates which the author makes, in passing or with deliberation, of the authors, great and small, of the past and the present?

Let us take these questions in order, and see what answers the Art Poétique, examined without prejudice, but without fear[370] or favour, can give to them.

287As to the first question there is, to a certain extent, no difference of opinion. Want of originality. The injured Cotin undoubtedly had truth on his side, in the parody quoted above, as to a large part of the Art Poétique. But what has not been quite sufficiently recognised is that this is the best part. Take away the almost (sometimes quite) literal translations from Horace, and you will take away Boileau’s backbone; take away the Horatian suggestions, and you will go far to deprive his criticism of its skeleton altogether, and leave it a mere jumble of promiscuous observations. It would be interesting and by no means otiose—if one only had the money and the time—to print the Art Poétique with the direct Horatian borrowment in rubric, the suggested passages in black italic, and the mere personalities, illustrations, flatteries, lampoons, and the like, in, say, blue. But I fear the remains in ordinary print would be wofully small, and still more wofully unimportant. This, however, would not matter so very much if Boileau had been strikingly original in what he adds, or had applied the Horatian doctrine with striking appropriateness to the altered condition of literature. One would think it impossible, if distinguished instances to the contrary were not known, for any one to maintain that he has done either. By far the greater part of the achievements of modern, and practically the whole of the achievements of mediæval, literature up to his time, are simply ignored, or, where referred to, ridiculously misdescribed. Nay more, Horatian parallels are got in by inventing a history of what never existed.

Nor could anything else possibly happen, considering the methods which Boileau chose to adopt. Faults of method. These methods are, First, the construction of a Horatian-Aristotelian bed to which everything has to be adjusted in point of principle; and of this it is not necessary to say more. Secondly, the suggestion as models, at every turn, of Latin and (much less often) Greek poets, utterly regardless of the change of circumstances. Thirdly, the method of criticism by Kinds—of 288laying down the rules for, and discussing the ends of, the abstract Pastoral, the abstract Elegy, the abstract Sonnet, Ode, and so forth, with only a few perfunctory eulogies of actual examples. In regard to the first and second it is enough to quote the critic’s own words against him, and ask him how Ovid or Tibullus can be a sufficient, can be even a safe, guide to a French love-poet, and how the marvels of ancient mythology can become the “machinery” of a modern epic? In regard to the third, the old battering-ram must be once more applied. Pastoral, Elegy, Ode, and the rest (except “Sonnet,” which is a form) are not unequivocal names applied to abstractly existing things, but mere tickets. Give me a poem, and I will tell you whether I think it a good or a bad poem, and why. You may, after that, if you have the time and care to take the trouble, classify it as epic or elegy, epigram or ode. But the box in which you choose to deposit it does not really matter in the least; and if it should so happen that there is no box ready, you must either make, or do without, one. Is the poem good or bad as poetry?—that is the articulus stantis vel cadentis criticismi.

But the most surprising thing in Boileau’s method, and the most fatal, is the thing on which he prides himself most, and which has been most commended in him—the perpetual appeal to Good Sense and Reason.[371] Obsession of good sense. It is surprising, because Longinus, whom he strangely assumed to be a prophet after his own heart, had warned him amply, and one might think irresistibly, some fifteen hundred years before. “Heights of eloquence or of poetry, but especially of poetry,” that mighty critic had said, “do not lead to persuasion but to ecstasy.” Now it is with Persuasion only—in the Greek sense, which includes intellectual conviction and practical influence—that Good Sense and Reason, in Boileau’s sense, can deal. It is true that very glaring offences against them may sometimes (by no means always) interfere with Ecstasy; but the most 289heroic doses of either or both will never cause it. Generally speaking—the saying has of course the danger of the double edge, but it is true for all that—when Good Sense comes in at the door Ecstasy flies out of the window, and when Ecstasy flies in at the window, Good Sense and (the lower) Reason retire prudishly by the door. At any rate, if they remain, it will be necessary for them to keep themselves very much in the background, and wait till they are called for. They may very well act as detectives and catchpolls when False Ecstasy usurps the place of true; but like other police-officers they have rather an awkward habit of mistaking their men. Every respect is of course to be paid to them; their assistance is sometimes very welcome and valuable even to the poet, while the prose-writer can seldom dispense with their constant surveillance. But even the latter may sometimes be hindered of his finest effects by looking first to them; while the Poet who does so will never rise beyond the lower-middle slopes of Parnassus, if he even reaches these.

Now, unless these considerations can be got out of the way, the answer to yet a further question, What help does Boileau give the Poet? will be a most meagre and disappointing one. Some of the positive helps which he offers—the rule of Good Sense, and the empty forms of Kinds—are likely to be, in the first case positively mischievous, in the second rather hindering than helpful. His historical doctrine is usually wrong, and, where not wrong, inadequate. His constant prescription of “the ancients”—not merely as general guides in literature—nobody need ask for better—but as immediate and particular models for all kinds of literary exercise, will in its most rigorous observation make a mere translating anachronist, and even if more freely construed, will again hinder much more than it helps.

But the majority of Boileau’s counsels are not positive at all, they are simply negative: and negative counsels in art, when the pupil is once out of schoolboyhood, never did much good yet, and have often done a great deal of harm. Arbitrary proscriptions. Why should his risus ineptus at the name “Childebrand” proscribe that name, which is euphonious enough to 290unprejudiced ears? What “sensible and reasonable” (we may thank him for these words) criterion of sound makes “Philis” preferable to “Toinon” or, prettier still, Toinette? It is true, doubtless, that, for a continuance, the long Alexandrine divides best at the middle; but what reason, what sense is there in the absolute proscription of a penthemimeral or hephthemimeral cæsura? In what does the welcoming of Pan and Charon, and the banishing of Ashtaroth and Beelzebub, differ from the immortal decision that “blue uniforms are only good for the artillery and the Blue Horse”? And so throughout.

But, it will be said, the Art Poétique is not Boileau’s sole critical deliverance. Boileau’s other works. It is most true; in fact, though his work is for a man who went safely beyond the three score years and ten and half-way to the four score,[372] a rather scanty work, it is pervaded with literature and with criticism. By a curious contrast to those Roman satirists, of whom we spoke erstwhile, his criticism of life is always turning to literature. The admirable heroi-comic satire of the Lutrin itself gravitates somehow or other to the battle in the book-shop, which enables the poet to gibbet his victims once more; not to mention that the whole fun of this very Lutrin is (though Boileau did not in the least know it) a sort of reductio ad absurdum of his own critical doctrines in the Art. Most of the other pieces are either directly critical of a kind, or the expression of brief and rather reluctantly obeyed avocations from criticism. Let us examine them,—though with somewhat less minuteness.

The dominance of the literary subject in the Satires is well known, though it is equally notorious that illiberal personality too often takes the place of liberal criticism. The Satires. Colletet’s poverty and parasitism; Saint-Amant’s 291death from fever, brought on by his ill-success (he would have died of hunger anyhow, says the satirist good-naturedly)—these are the subjects that interest him in the First. In the Second to Molière, with oblique censure of, or at least surprise at the easy versification of the dramatist, he bewails (being evidently proud of it) his own studious “difficulty”[373] in rhyming, jests at the stock phrases and chevilles of others from Ménage to Scudéry. Even in the Third—the old bad-dinner satire of Horace and Regnier—he brings in a literary quarrel about Théophile and Ronsard and Quinault. The Fifth, to Dangeau, is one of the few which have hardly any literary touches. But he will drag the luckless Abbé de Pure into the Sixth on the noises and nuisances of Paris, while the Seventh is wholly literary, and is one of the earliest (1663) of his explosions at bad poets, and the Eighth, on the follies of humanity, naturally takes shots at the old target.

All these, however, much more the awkward Tenth, on Women, and the very inferior Eleventh, must give place to the Ninth, an imitation of Horace, II. vii., written in the author’s fortieth or forty-first year, nominally to defend himself for his former attacks on his compeers, but really, of course, to renew them. Once more his favourite equivalents (only mentioned infamiæ causa) for Gyas and Cloanthus—Colletet, Pelletier, Quinault, and the rest—appear. Once more Racan receives partial, and Théophile almost total, insult. Here is the famous contrast of le clinquant du Tasse and l’or de Virgile; and here the still more famous lines on the Cid, embedded in—and plainly owing their complimentary tone to the fact that they are embedded in—an onslaught on Chapelain. Again and again the luckless Cotin is “horsed” and justified: while the almost equally luckless Pelletier[374] serves as a foil to “d’Ablancourt et Patru.” The singular posthumous piece Sur l'Équivoque, appended usually as 292the Twelfth satire, is a sort of attempt to generalise and amplify the author’s horror of conceit and obscurity.

To dwell on the minor pieces of verse, which are often literary, would be here impossible; it is enough to say that they include the two epigrams on Corneille’s Agésilas and Attila, and numerous assaults on Perrault. The Epigrams and Epistles. The Epistles are not nearly so full of our matter as the Satires; but the Seventh (to Racine on the success of the opposition Phèdre by the hated Pradon) and the Tenth (on his own verses) belong to us. The first of these has been very highly, and in part quite deservedly, praised. The reference to the death and the almost dishonoured grave of Molière, though slightly theatrical, is both vigorous and really touching; the eulogy of Racine himself is, in the circumstances, but allowably excessive; and the half-flattering, half-boasting mention of his own enjoyment of the favour of the “great,” from Louis to La Rochefoucauld, would be tolerable if it were not mainly a vehicle for fresh abuse of Linière and Tallemant, of Perrin and Pradon himself.

Prose—The Héros de Roman; the Réflexions sur Longin.

The prose is equally saturated with criticism. The dialogue on Les Héros de Roman, which Fontenelle could have done admirably, Boileau has not done very well; but his satire on the extraordinary bastard kind of romance with which France at this time deluged Europe is not ill-founded, though rather ill-informed.[375] The Letters are full enough of criticism. But the two chief prose documents from which (at least from their titles) something really important may be expected, are the Dissertation on the story of Giocondo, as told by its inventor and by La Fontaine, and the Réflexions sur Longin. These last, however, the reader need hardly trouble himself with: they may even be classed among the impieties of criticism. Boileau, little as he could have appreciated, did at least know the Great Unknown. He translated him; he calls him very truly le plus grand, and more questionably le plus sévère, of ancient critics. 293But these Réflexions on Longinus are in fact reflections on Charles Perrault, a very clever person, but not in the least like Longinus: and the texts from the Περὶ Ὕψους, which are put at the head of each chapter, often have nothing to do with the subject at all, and in almost every case might almost as well have been selected from the first book he picked up. In the particular dispute I am with him, and not with Perrault; but the first exclamation of any real lover of the real classics who reads the piece must be Non tali auxilio! Boileau, as always, is arrogant and rude; as sometimes elsewhere his scholarship is not beyond suspicion, though it had an easy triumph over the almost total absence of the same quality in his adversary; but, as he is very seldom, he is confused, desultory, heavy. To those who think that criticism is the art of scolding, the Réflexions sur Longin may seem to be a creditable exercise in it: hardly to others.

Almost the only critical essay of the proper kind that we have from this famous critic is the other piece mentioned above—the “Dissertation on the Joconde.” The “Dissertation on Joconde.” The occasion was not unpromising. A certain M. de Saint-Gilles, seriously or otherwise, had preferred the version of Ariosto’s tale by one Bouillon to that of La Fontaine, and the question (which had taken the form of a bet between Saint-Gilles and La Mothe le Vayer de Bretigny) was referred to Boileau for decision. I confess that I have never taken the trouble to look up the works of M. de Bouillon: the specimens that Boileau gives are quite enough, and he exercises his ferule like the vigorous and (within limits) accurate and useful pedagogue that he is. But, unluckily, he thinks it necessary not merely to prefer La Fontaine to Bouillon, but to belittle Ariosto[376] in favour of La Fontaine. I defy anybody—Frenchman or non-Frenchman—to have, within certain limits, a greater admiration for La Fontaine than I have; and I am heretical enough to like the Contes even better than the Fables. 294But why this miserable setting of two great things against each other? Why not like both? This is what critics of the Boileau type cannot do: they must have their rat-pit of false comparison, their setting-by-the-ears, their belittling in order to exalt. It must be said that Boileau is justly punished. His usual critical censures are so vague and general—he is so apt to tell us that So-and-so is a bad poet without showing us how he is bad—that he escapes confutation. Not so here. In the first place he shows, as perhaps we might have anticipated, that worst of critical defects, an inability to “take” his author. He is very angry with the famous grave beginning of the tavern-keeper’s much less than grave story—the stately Astolfo, re de' Longobardi, and the rest. He thinks that “le bon messer Ludovico” had forgotten, or rather did not care for, the precept of his Horace, “Versibus exponi tragicis res comica non vult.”

Undoubtedly Messer Ludovico did not care one of his favourite turnips for it! And, according to the key of humour in which he was writing—a key struck before him, but never so well as by him, in Italian, familiar in English, but unknown in French till recently—he was quite right in this negligence. Boileau proceeds to give rules for “telling an absurd thing in such a manner as to intimate to the reader that you do not yourself believe it.” Very good; that is the Lutrin way—a capital way too; but not the only one. And Ariosto is at least entitled to try this other, in which he succeeds so admirably to all who have eyes or ears and will use them. The critic, again, is very angry with Ariosto for making Giocondo abstain from poniarding his wife because of the love he bore her. “Il n’y a point de passion plus tragique et plus violente que la jalousie qui naît d’un extrème amour.” Let us not remark too unkindly that Despréaux' knowledge of un extrème amour was, by all accounts, including his own, the reverse of experimental. His error is more widespreading. It is part of that unlucky arrangement of “typed” kinds—not less of character and passion than of writing—which the neo-classic system insists upon. Your passions, like your poetic forms, are all pigeon-holed, and their conduct prescribed to them. You must “keep the type” once more. Pour le bonheur du genre humain, Ariosto knew better.

295We must not, tempting as it is, dwell on the plea that Giocondo’s honest agony, “a quelque chose de tragique qui ne vaut rien dans un conte à rire,” while La Fontaine’s easy-going wittol is quite a cheerful object; on the inestimable cry of outraged verisimilitude, “Où est-ce que Joconde trouve si vite une hostie sacrée pour faire jurer le roi?” or on the extraordinary casuistry as to the time occupied, in the two versions, by the climax of the triple arrangement of Fiammetta. In this, as in the remarkable letter of reconciliation to Perrault,[377] one is at first inclined to suspect irony; but in neither case will the hypothesis work out. Here Boileau presents what looks like a caricature of the “classical” criticism; yet it exactly coincides with his general precepts elsewhere. There he gives away almost, not quite, the whole of the Ancient case by admitting the superiority of the moderns after a fashion which, if we took it to be ironical, would reflect upon his own familiar friends and patterns—Molière, La Fontaine, and Racine.

In fact, recent and repeated reading of Boileau has made me doubt whether he had any critical principle, except that of Good Sense. A “Solifidian of Good Sense.” He almost says so in so many words in the Art Poétique; his general or particular sayings elsewhere say it over again with mere change of name and instance. If he loved the classics, it was because the classics he knew best—the Latins of the Augustan age—do probably observe this “good-sense” standard more than any other great writers of any time but his own. And if he was unjust to the great writers of the time just before his own, and savage to the small among his contemporaries, it was because the prevailing fashion, for two or three generations, had set in a direction which Good Sense alone must constantly disapprove. Now Good Sense is not a high tribunal, but a very low one,—we were better off with our old friend Furor Poeticus, though he did sometimes talk, and encourage the talking of, nonsense. The mere “Solifidian” of Good Sense knows nothing, and can know nothing, about poetry.

Nay more, one may ask without real impertinence, Is Boileau’s 296Art Poétique in any vital and important sense an Art of Poetry at all, any more than it is an Art of Pig-breeding, or of Pottery-making, or of Pyrotechnics? In all these useful and agreeable pursuits—for the matter of that in all other arts, trades, professions, employments, and vocations—it is desirable to know what you are about, to proceed cautiously and sensibly, to choose the right materials, to combine them in the right way, not to go beyond your powers and means, to vary your appeals to the public, to take good advice, to observe the practice of proved success in the particular department, to study its kinds and species carefully, not to launch out too far nor restrain your operations too much, and to observe the laws of morality and propriety throughout. But what is there specially poetical in all this? Or what does Boileau add to this to make his treatise specially poetical? A few—decidedly few—technical cautions of the lower kind, not all of them unquestionable; some general or mediate rules, mostly borrowed from Horace, and not a few of them more questionable still; some literary history which, as we have seen, is utterly worthless; and a seasoning of mostly spiteful hits at poets he dislikes.

But, they say—and this is practically the stronghold to which they all retire—“Look at his practical services to French literature and French poetry. The plea for his practical services. Look at the badness of the styles he attacked, and the completeness with which he cleared them away. What a reformer! What a Hercules purging the poetic country of monsters and malefactors! Can you possibly deny this merit?”

Let nothing be denied—or, for the matter of that, affirmed—before everything has been considered. Historical examination of this. What are the facts? Boileau came at the end—at the very end—of a stage of French poetry which had been rather a long one, and unquestionably one of very chequered and not very highly distinguished performance. The somewhat hasty theories, and the often splendid, but nearly always unequal, practice of the Pléiade, had given place to a sort of rococo individualism, to the bastard and easily ignoble kinds of parody and burlesque, or to corrupt followings of Spanish and Italian practice. Many charming, and some fine, things 297(including that stately passage of Chapelain’s which many classical critics, who scoff at his name, have admired when all but literally translated in The Deserted Village) had been written; but the writers had constantly dropped from them to the trivial and the bombastic. But when Boileau began seriously to write in 1663-64,[378] this period was in its very last stage. It could not have lasted much, or any, longer if there had been no Boileau at all. Of his actual victims some were long dead; others were very old men; the younger were persons of no importance, ephemera, whether critical or poetical, which would have died with the day. The smoky torch of Théophile—a true poetic torch for all its smoke—had flickered out nearly forty years before. Cyrano, to whom Boileau gives contemptuous blessing in part, only that he may ban him and others more effectively, had slept in peace for eight years. Saint-Amant, who had real poetic gift, and who, if he was no scholar in the ancient tongues, knew the modern in a fashion which puts Boileau’s ignorance of their literatures to shame, had met the end described so feelingly by his critic some three years earlier. Chapelain was a man of sixty-seven; Cotin one of sixty. It is by attacking not the dead and decrepit, but the young and rising, that a man shows himself a great warrior and a useful citizen in criticism. In fact, the principles of correctness which Boileau espoused had, as we have seen, been practically taken up long before, even by poor creatures like the Abbé d’Aubignac, in certain departments, and Chapelain himself had smitten in this sense before he felt the wounds.

Still less can Boileau be allowed any credit for the great achievements which undoubtedly took place during his own middle life. The glories of French literature in verse (and, as far as the three first go, in poetry), about 1664, are Corneille, Racine, La Fontaine, Molière. Corneille had been writing before Boileau was born: the only piece of his which Boileau praises generously was produced in the year of the critic’s birth; and that critic is silent about most of the Master’s work, and sneers ignobly at its later examples. The magnificent 298genius of Molière owed nothing to Boileau in its beginnings, and accepted little, if anything, from his criticism in its perfection; while not all of its results were cordially welcomed by the critic, personal friends as they were. La Fontaine, an older man than Boileau by fifteen years, was still more independent of him at the beginning, shows extremely little mark of any influence from him at any time, and, for all their friendship, experienced from him the almost unaccountable omission of his favourite kind, the Fable (unlike the Conte, a perfectly “unobjectionable” one), in the Art Poétique itself. There remains Racine, and, if the schooling and training of Racine seem to any one so great a thing that his schoolmaster and trainer becomes, ipso facto, one of the Di majores of criticism, there is not much more to be said. But there is something: and it is this. In the first place, to assume that Racine’s genius could not have made its own way without Boileau’s mentorship, is to pay a far worse compliment to that genius than some not very fervent Racinians can allow; and, in the second, the spirit, if not the letter, of his criticism is against that of Racine’s very best work. If I cared to do so, I think I could show that Phèdre herself comes within the Bolæan[379] maledictions. As for Athalie, the very admirers of Boileau have asked how, after his unsparing censure of the religious epic, he could tolerate the religious drama?

Have we done? Not quite. After such a reformation, after such labours of Hercules as we have held up to us, we are entitled to expect a new crop, a new breed of poets rising everywhere from the purged and heartened land. Is the poetic product of the last quarter of the seventeenth century in France so admirable, so refreshing, such a contrast to the period of Chapelain and Saint-Amant? I have some small acquaintance with French literature, but I am unable to supply the names of the “Poets like Shakespeare, Beautiful souls,” who, formed by the precepts of the Art Poétique, rush in crowds 299upon the sight during that period. But, it will be said, time must be given—the French poetry of the eighteenth century is the work of Boileau through his disciples. It is: and by these fruits may he and they be justly judged. He cannot, indeed, claim the admirable light work of Piron and the rest: some of it very nearly, or quite, incurs his anathemas, and all is composed more or less outside his precepts, and in accordance with the practice of La Fontaine rather than with his. But he can claim the Henriade, and, in part, the odes of J. B. Rousseau—he may be permitted even to assume the laurels of Delille and of Le Brun—Pindare. Perhaps, despite the sacred adage, the growth of the thorn does indicate the strength and genuineness of the vine, and, perhaps, it can only be a fig which is so fertile in such stately thistles.

But the real weakness of Boileau’s criticism does not fully appear till we come to examine him on the true ground. Concluding remarks on him. What are his actual critical deliverances, on concrete critical points, worth? We have seen something of the answer to this already. A certain amount of his condemning censure—though nearly always expressed without urbaneness, without humanity, with the hectoring and bullying tone of an ill-conditioned schoolmaster, or the venom of a spiteful rival—must be validated; there is no lack of bad writers at any time, and Boileau’s provided a plentiful crop of them. But in most instances these writers were unimportant weeds, who would have been cast into the oven on the morrow of their flourishing, if Boileau had never written a line. On the other hand, in regard to the two greatest writers, in verse or drama, of his own day and country, Corneille and Molière, he loses no opportunity of censuring the one, and accords, till after his death, but faint and limited praise to the other. Even his misbeloved ancients he cannot praise with the mingled enthusiasm and acuteness that mark Longinus, or even Dionysius. The great merit of Virgil, in his eyes, is that Virgil manages mythological “machines” so deftly: and, if we look elsewhere at what he says of writers so different as Æschylus and Ovid, we shall find a flat generality, with no attempt even at the mot propre. Only on the satirists, at least on Horace 300and Juvenal, is he better. For Boileau, as we have said, was a satirist to the core, to the finger-tips, and here he speaks as he feels. If we want his opinion on great modern foreign poets, we have it explicitly on Tasso and Ariosto, implicitly in his silence about almost everybody else.

I am not conscious of any unfairness or omission, though I do not pretend to a mere colourless impartiality, in this survey; and after it I think we may go back to the general question, may ask, Is this a great or even a good critic? and may answer it in the negative. That Boileau was important to his own time may be granted; that he was no ill scavenger of certain sorts of literary rubbish may be granted; that he gave help to those who chose to tread in the limited path to which France was confining herself, so that they might tread it with somewhat more grace, with much more of firmness and confidence than they would otherwise have done—that, in short, he did for France something of the same kind as that which Dryden did for England, may be granted. This is not exactly a small thing. But before we call it a great one we must look at the other side. Boileau did not, like Dryden, leave escapes and safety-valves to the spirit that was too mighty for the narrower channels of poetic style; he exhibited none of his contemporary’s catholicity of mind and taste; he had none of his noble enthusiasms, none of his constructive power and progressive flexibility in positive critical estimate. The good that he did is terribly chequered by the consideration that, in sharpening certain edges of the French mind, he blunted and distorted others in a fashion which, after two hundred years, has not been fully remedied. A great man of letters, perhaps; a craftsmanlike “finisher of the law,” and no ill pedagogue in literature certainly: but a great critic? Scarcely, I think.

Two writers at least, whom few would call lesser men of letters than Boileau, and in whom some may see greater qualifications for criticism, must be much more briefly dealt with, partly because in their case no controversy is needed, partly because their actual contributions to criticism form but a very small part of their work, and partly also because neither aimed at for himself, or has received from posterity and tradition, 301any very prominent place as a critic. La Bruyère and Fénelon. These are La Bruyère and Fénelon. It would not be correct to say that either is in deliberate or conscious opposition to the législateur du Parnasse. Their general conscious principles are much the same as his; they are, like him, uncompromising defenders of the Ancients, and though Fénelon has a private crotchet about poetic prose, yet the non-essentiality of verse to poetry had been a general, if not a universal, tenet with antiquity. But whether in consequence of that impatience of despotism which those who love to mix literary and political history have seen in the second generation of the siècle de Louis XIV., as compared with the first; or from the fact that, as compared with Boileau, they were much more of Greek,[380] and less of purely Latin students; or simply as a result of what has been justly attributed to both,[381] the predominance of the sens propre over mere observation of the communis sensus—it is certain that both, and especially Fénelon, display much more individualism, and at the same time much more catholicity. It may be added that they know more, and are to some extent (though to no large one) free from that hopeless ignoring of older French literature which was Boileau’s greatest fault.

La Bruyère’s[382] contribution is contained in the opening section, “Des Ouvrages de l’Esprit,” of his famous Caractères. The “Des Ouvrages de l’Esprit.” It is not very long; it is—according to the plan of the work it is not merely entitled but obliged to be—studiously desultory; and it is not perhaps improved by the other necessity of throwing much of it into portraits of imaginary persons, who are sometimes no doubt very close copies of real ones. But it contains some open and undisguised judgments of the great writers of the past, and a number of astonishingly original, pregnant, and monumentally phrased observations of a general character. In fact I should not hesitate to say that La Bruyère is, after Dryden, who had preceded him by twenty years, the first very great man of letters in 302modern times who gave himself to Criticism with a comparatively unshackled mind, and who has put matter of permanent value in her treasuries without being a professional rhetorician or commentator. General observations. We need not dwell on the famous overture Tout est dit, for it is merely a brilliant example of the kind of paradox-shell or rocket, half truth, half falsehood, which a writer of the kind explodes at the beginning of his entertainment, to attract the attention of his readers, and let them see the brilliancy of the stars that drop from it. But how astonishing is it, in the 17th section, to find, two hundred years and more ago, the full Flaubertian doctrine of the “single word” laid down with confidence, and without an apparent sense that the writer is saying anything new![383] No matter that soon after, in 20, we find an old fallacy, ever new, put in the words, “Le plaisir de la critique nous ôte celui d'être vivement touchés de très-belles choses.” If criticism does this it is the wrong criticism—the criticism à la Boileau, and not the criticism after the manner of Longinus. A man may have spent a lifetime in reading “overthwart and endlong” (as the Morte d’Arthur says) in every direction of literature, in reading always critically, and in reading for long years as professional reviewer, and yet feel as keenly as ever the literary charm which age cannot wither nor custom stale,—the “strong pleasure” of the beautiful word.

But how well he recovers himself, among other things, with the remarks on the Cid, and the difference between the fine and the faultless at 30! with the declaration of independence immediately following in 31, and practically drawing a cancel through the whole critical teaching of Boileau! “Quand une lecture vous élève l’esprit, ... ne cherchez pas une autre règle pour juger; il est bon.” How delicate his remarks in 37 on the delicacy of touch, the illogical but impeccable concatenation, the justice of phrase, of the best feminine writing! Not a few of his observations are paraphrases or, as it were, echoes of Longinus himself, whom he has assimilated as Longinus’ translator never could have done. And if some further remarks on criticism in 63 seem to regard rather the abuse than the nature 303of the art—if the famous “Un homme né Chrétien et Français se trouve contraint dans la satire; les grands sujets lui sont défendus,” is half a political grumble and half a paralogism, which was to be accepted with fatal results in the next century—both this and other things are redeemed throughout by the general independence and freshness of the judgment, the vigour and decision of the phrase. In the judgments of authors above referred to (which begin at 38 and continue for some eight or nine numbers, to be resumed with special reference to dramatists and dramas a little later), it is especially possible to appreciate La Bruyère’s idiosyncrasy as a critic, the vivacity and power of his natural endowments in this direction, and his drawback, arising partly from sheer acceptance of prevailing opinion, and partly from the fact that he is merely coasting the subject on his way to others.

In the joint or contrasted judgment of Terence and Molière the modern man, according to his kind, may find something either to laugh or to be irritated at. Judgments of authors. Some would as soon think of comparing the dribbling tap of a jar of distilled water to the Falls of Schaffhausen. But La Bruyère practically shows himself as conscious of the truth as his time would let him be when, allowing Terence purity, exactness to rule, polish, elegance, character (i.e., type-character), he ruins all by admitting that “il n’a manqué à lui que d'être moins froid.” And if (as many did then, and some do now) he takes that wrong view of style and language which permits them to accuse Molière of “jargon,” of barbarism, he gives him fire, naïveté, a fount of real pleasantry, exact representation (“imitation”) of manners, imagery, and “the scourge of ridicule.” “What a man,” he says, “you could have made of these two!” though how you can join fire and froid, and what would have been left of Terence’s old-maidish neatness when joined to such a husband, Heaven and Apollo only know! But we can see very well that La Bruyère admires Molière because he does admire him, and Terence because he is told to do so.

The conjunction, even in contrast, of Malherbe and Théophile has puzzled some folk; but, as M. Servois points out, it is a mere matter of chronology, and Boileau had done it before. And it is very noteworthy that La Bruyère does not bear hardly 304on Théophile. The remark that Marot seems more modern than Ronsard is perfectly well founded. And if there is some oddity in his surprise that Marot, “natural and easy as he is, did not make of Ronsard, so full of verve and fire, a poet better than either of them actually is,” it is much less odd, and much more acute, than it looks at first sight. The judgment of Rabelais, a famous one, if not wholly wide-eyed, keeps its eyes singularly wide open for so artificial an age: and there is a whole volume in the double defence of Montaigne against opposite criticisms, to the effect that he is too full of thought for some men, and too natural in his mode of thinking for others.

It is by no means certain that the unnamed author aimed at in 52 is Molière, and the most fervent of “Cornelians” can hardly quarrel with the judgment that Corneille is unequalled where he is good, but more often unequal to himself. La Bruyère seems, though rather furtively, to set the awful Unities at nought in this great dramatist’s favour; and he is both just and happy in praising the variety of Corneille as compared to the monotony of Racine. The whole article, which is a long one, is distinctly on the Cornelian side, though far from unjust to Racine; and one can well understand the disconcerting effect which it seems to have produced on Voltaire.

On the whole, the only reasons for not ranking La Bruyère’s criticism very high indeed are that there is so little of it, and that it is obviously the work of a man to whom it is more a casual pastime than a business—who has not thought himself out all along the line in it, but has emitted a few observations. Still, those which express his deliberate opinions are almost always sound, and only some of those which he has adopted without examination are wholly or partially false.

The critical utterances of Fénelon[384] are much more voluminous, 305though in part, at least, not quite so disinterested, and they are of a very high critical interest and value. Fénelon. The Dialogues sur l’Eloquence. They are contained in two documents, the Dialogues sur l’Eloquence (which, though not known, is believed to be a work of his early manhood, but was only published after his death by the Chevalier Ramsay) and one of his very latest pieces, the Mémoire sur les Occupations de l’Académie Française, sent in, to obey a resolution of that body, in November 1713, with the much longer explanatory letter of the next year thereon to Dacier.

The first is conditioned—unfavourably it may seem for our purpose—by its avowed limitation to sacred eloquence. A young aspirant to the cloth has fallen in love with a fashionable preacher, wishes a cooler friend to share his enthusiasm, and, being rebuffed, elicits from that friend by degrees a complete criticism of the rhetoric of the pulpit, and the rules that should govern it. Since we have found discussions, even of profane oratory, surprisingly barren in pure literary criticism of old, this of sacred may seem still less promising. But though Fénelon’s interest in the soul-curing part of the matter is constant and intense, he does not allow it either to obscure or to adulterate his literary censure. At first, in particular, the arguments of his “A” (the critical friend who, no doubt, is Fénelon himself) not merely have nothing more to do with the pulpit than with the bar or the Senate, but have little if anything more to do with spoken than with written literature. The disdainful description (at p. 5 ed. cit.) of that epigrammatic or enigmatic style, which is always with us, as des tours de passe-passe; the excellent passage (ibid., 7-9) on Demosthenes, Isocrates, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, and Longinus himself—on whom Fénelon speaks with far more appreciation than Boileau, and probably with more knowledge than Dryden; the bold attitude taken up at p. 18 on the question of the perfect hero; the exaltation (perhaps the most noteworthy thing in the whole) of “painting,” of bringing the visual image home to the reader, at p. 35; the scorn of mere verbal fault-finding at p. 47; the ardent panegyric of the literary greatness of the Bible at p. 69; and of the Fathers at p. 86 sq.—all these 306passages, which are almost pure gold of criticism, have nothing special to do with the mere métier of the preacher. That Fénelon was neither perfect nor wholly beyond his time is quite true. He has here a deplorable assault on Gothic Architecture (which he repeats at greater length in the Academic letter, and for which, if he had not been so good and great a man, one could wish the stones of his cathedral to have fallen upon him), and his contempt extends to mediæval literature. But the same doom is on the best of archbishops and the most beautiful of girls: they can but give what they have.

And Fénelon gives very much. The Memoir and Letter above referred to were elicited by a demand on Academicians for proposals in regard to the reorganising of the work of the AcademyAcademy. Sur les Occupations de l’Académie Française. Here, therefore, as in the other case, the immediate purpose is special; but the general literary interests of the critic again prevent it from being specialised in the dismal and deadly modern sense. He does not fail to deal with the daily dreadful line of the Dictionary; but he proposes, as supplements, divers things—a new Poetic, a new Rhetoric, Chrestomathies from the Ancients on both heads (things needed to this day), and above all, a complete Academic edition of the great classics of France, with really critical introduction and annotations, or at least a corpus of critical observations on them.

But, as usual, it is in the incidental remarks that the value of the piece lies; and these make it, I do not hesitate to say, the most valuable single piece of criticism that France had yet produced. Fénelon shows his acquaintance with other modern languages; and pays a particular compliment to Prior, who, it must be remembered, was about this time occupying his rather uneasy post of Ambassador. He may be too hasty in saying that the Italians and Spaniards will perhaps never make good tragedies or epigrams, nor the French good epics and sonnets, as he most certainly is too ignorant in saying that “after our ancient poets” [a very few, mostly undistinguished persons, in the latter part of the sixteenth century] had tried classical metres and failed, “we” [the French of course] “had to invent 307measures suitable to our words.” But he is astonishingly bold in his recurrence to Pléiade principles, and in actually urging English as a good example on the point of taking from neighbours any word found convenient. He says plumply “de telles usurpations sont permises” (p. 103 ed. cit.) Alas! in England itself, and after two centuries, one uses this just liberty at personal risk. His Rhetoric section partly repeats the Dialogues, and is altogether more technical or professional than literary. And its challenge to correctness. But his Poetical section is full of interest. It is marred by that not quite single-minded fancy for prose poetry which has already been glanced at, and to which we shall have to return. But the attack on rhyme is partly excused, and the, at first sight, bewildering remark (p. 123) that “rhyme is of itself more difficult than all the rules of Greek and Latin prosody” is rendered intelligible, by a remembrance of the extremely arbitrary rules which had by this time been imposed on the French rhymer. The paragraph on Ronsard,[385] the best known piece of the whole, is admirable in its tempering of sympathy with censure; and the acknowledgment of the “opposite extreme” into which French for more than a century had fallen,[386] is one of the great epoch-making sentences of criticism. Of course it was not attended to; but for a hundred years and more French literature bore ever-increasing testimony to its truth.

The censure of French drama is injured, partly by certain prejudices of the moralist and the theologian, and partly by less accountable crotchets. On Molière in particular, though he cannot help admiring the greatest of his contemporary countrymen, he is something from which we had best turn our faces, putting likewise into the wallet at our backs (and Time’s) the complaints of la basse plaisanterie de Plaute, and the statement 308that on se passe volontiers d’Aristophane. The point is the quantity of opinion which is not for Oblivion’s alms-bag. And, abundant as this is in Fénelon, the quality of it is more remarkable even than the quantity. He always prefers the study of author, and book, and piece, and phrase, to the study of Kind and the manufacture of Rule. Though he is in no sense an Anarchist, and may even have sometimes his cloth rather too much in his remembrance, yet he remembers likewise, and transfers to profane things, the sacred precept, “Prove all things: hold fast that which is good.” The fatal fault of the extremest kind of neo-classic criticism—the weak point in all of it—is the usual refusal to “prove” the work, even to see whether it is good or not, if it fails to answer at first blush to certain arbitrary specifications. Fénelon is free from this: he has escaped from the House of Bondage.

We have for some time been occupied with the critical work of great men of letters; we must now turn to that of four men who, if they had not been critics, would hardly have been heard of in their own day, and would certainly not be remembered by posterity out of their own country—or perhaps in it. As it was, all the four exercised immense influence, not merely in France but elsewhere, and three of them saw their work promptly translated into English, and received with almost touching deference in the country which had Dryden to look to for criticism, nay, by Dryden himself. The order in which we may take them shall be determined by that of the appearance of their principal critical works. The Pratique du Théâtre of François Hédelin, Abbé d’Aubignac, appeared in 1657; the first Réflexions of Rapin in 1668; the Entretiens d’Ariste of Bouhours in 1671; and the Traité du Poème Epique of Le Bossu in 1675. All four, it is to be observed, were clerics of one sort or another, while Rapin and Bouhours were schoolmasters, and Hédelin was at least a private tutor. Taken together, they exhibit the hand-book and school-book side of the criticism of which Boileau is the contemporary satiric expositor to the world; and their criticism cannot properly be dissociated from his. As dates sufficiently show, they do not in any sense derive from him; nor, to do him justice, does 309he from them. The whole quintet, with others of less importance, are all the more valuable exponents of the strong contemporary set of the tide in the direction of hard-and-fast “classical” legislation for literature.

It is among the few and peculiar laurels of the Abbé D’Aubignac to have failed in more kinds of literature than most men try. The Abbé D’Aubignac. His tragedy of Zénobie (1647) was the occasion of a well-known epigram from the great Condé, which is not the less good for its obviousness, and which, with equal ease and justice,[387] can be adjusted to his criticism. He is more of an Aristotelian “know-nothing” than La Mesnardière, and has very much less talent. Not content with the Pratique (which, as has been said, was really a belated contribution to the cabal against Corneille), he attacked two of the great tragedian’s later plays, Sophonisbe and Sertorius, in his Dissertations en forme de Remarques (1663), and he had many years earlier attempted to justify Terence against the strictures of Ménage. The historian of criticism would have been grateful to him had he confined himself to writing tractates “On the nature of Satyrs, Brutes, Monsters, and Demons,”[388] Relations du Royaume de Coquetterie, and novels like the rather well-named Macarise, or the Queen of the Fortunate Isles. For these we could simply have neglected.

The Pratique, unfortunately, we cannot neglect wholly, because of its position as a symptom and an influence. His Pratique du Théâtre. In reading it,[389] the generous mind oscillates between a sense of intolerable boredom, and a certain ruth at the obviously honest purpose and industry that underlie the 310heaps of misapplied learning, and season the gabble of foolish authority-citing. He begins by a demonstration that all great statesmen have always patronised stately games, of which scenic representation is one. Vulgar minds have nothing to do with it (this was a slap at Castelvetro and his horrible doctrine of pleasing the multitude, which is a real lethalis arundo in the sides of all these Frenchmen). He is, we are rather surprised to hear, not going to theorise. All the theory has been done, and done once for all, by the ancients. What he wants to do is to apply this theory to all the practical contingencies. And this he does through Unities and Episodes, through Acts and Scenes, through Narration, Discourse, Deliberation, everything, with sleuth-hound patience on his own part, and requiring Job’s variety on that of his readers. He is sometimes quite fair even to Corneille, he seems to be quite well-meaning; but he cannot help his nativity of dulness, and at his very best he is a critic of dramaturgy, not of drama.

René Rapin, hardly as one sometimes feels inclined to think and speak of him, was a person of an entirely different order. Rapin. In fact, it is very much more on isolated and particular points than on generals that he lays himself open to reproach, though it may be retorted that the generals, which lead logically (as they usually do) to such absurd particulars, are thereby utterly condemned themselves. It was specially unfortunate for Rapin that his principles and precepts were at once caught up in England by a man like Rymer,[390] and expounded in coarse and blunted form to a people still green and unknowing in critical matters. His method partly good. There is even much in his 311method which deserves high praise. It is very noteworthy that, before he presumed to draw up (or at least to give to the world) his Réflexions on the Poetics and on Poetry, on Eloquence, on History, and on Philosophy, he had preluded by elaborate examinations of the actual documents in the shape of “Comparisons”—“Of Homer and Virgil,” “Of Cicero and Demosthenes,” “Of Thucydides and Livy,” “Of Plato and Aristotle.” And though this sort of “cock-fight comparison” (as the more vernacular writers of his own time in English might have said) is “muchwhat” (as his translator Rymer actually does say) of a mistake, unless pursued with the greatest possible care—though it was already hackneyed in itself and constantly in need of extending, supplementing, blending—yet it is at any rate infinitely superior to the examination in vacuo, the rattling of dry bones and abstract kinds and qualities, to which too many of his contemporaries confined themselves.

Unfortunately Rapin himself was always, consciously or unconsciously, tending towards this other method; and even in his comparisons—much more in the extended survey of ancient and modern writers which he subjoins to the Réflexions—he is still more constantly seduced by that labelling criticism which we have traced long ago to the “canonising” way of the Alexandrians, and for which we have said hard things of Fronto and others. His particular absurdities as to Homer in blame. Yet further, both his general style of criticism, and his prepossessions of this or that kind, constantly draw him into pitfalls only less absurd than those in which Rymer himself wallows. I do not remember that Rapin ever lays it down that a hero must not be a black man; probably the French had not been afflicted—for I suppose they did not make Syphax black—with any poet daring enough to start the question. But he does other things which, though less conspicuously, are quite as really silly. In the moral section[391] of his comparison between Homer and Virgil he has 312too much of the Jesuit schoolmaster, with his reverence towards boys, to mention that terrible scene between Zeus and Hera which had already distressed the compatriots of Aristophanes and Martial, and which remains one of the earliest examples of absolutely perfect poetry in a particular kind. But he makes up for it. We have, of course, the “wine-heavy, dog-eyed, hare-hearted” line to mourn over. How undignified of Homer to make Achilles anxious about the preservation of the body of Patroclus from corruption! How could Ulysses, with such an excellent wife and such an amiable son, waste time with Calypso and dangle after Circe, to whom the pudibund Rapin applies epithets which our Decorum prevents us from repeating, and for which he deserved to be both shipwrecked and turned into a Gryll. Was it quite nice of Priam, as a father, to wish all his children dead so Hector were alive? Nausicaa is too shocking. A Princess’s face should not show grace, the Jesuit thinks,[392] to men in Ulysses’ condition.

Whereas with Virgil it is quite different. Everybody, including the Gods, behaves “like persons of Quality.” As to Virgil in praise. Even in the case of Dido dux et Trojanus there is no violation of modesty,[393] which certainly seems either a little Escobarish towards them, or a little severe to Circe and Calypso. Indeed, we sometimes find ourselves rather lost with Rapin’s morality. For, in another passage (Chap. XIII.), he actually discovers un artifice des plus délicats et des plus fins in Virgil’s taking away Dido’s character, though History had made her a Lady of very good repute.[394] For he did it to bring into contempt the Carthaginians who were afterwards to become odious to Rome. “A nice marality!” indeed, as my Lord Foppington observed of another matter, not so very long after Rapin wrote this.

313Yet even here it is fair to observe that Rapin is at least trying to make the two ends of his “reason” and his “reflection” meet: and so it is always:—

“His reason rooted in unreason stands,
And sense insensate makes him idly wise.”

The consequences are patent on every page, and a chapter might be not disagreeably filled with them. As to others. Pegasus is admirable, but the Hippogriff is the vain imagination of a sick brain: Camilla touching, but Bradamante absurd. Achilles retires from the Grecian army because he is discontented; Æneas goes to Italy because he is pious; and Medea kills her children because she is revengeful—a passage in which it is agreeable to perceive the obvious first draught of “I love my love with an A.” As for the moderns, Du Bartas and Ronsard had all the genius their age was capable of—a text for a sermon as long as this Book. “Scarce aught can be understood” of the Agamemnon! In fact, quotations[395] simply leap to the eye as one reads the page.

It is more important, if less amusing, to inquire how a man, obviously of much ability, extremely well informed, freer, it would seem, from mere prejudice than most of his fellows, came in this way to be constantly stumbling over blocks that the veriest blockhead might, one would think, have avoided, and running against blank walls, of which a blind man might, it should seem, have been aware. The reading of his riddle. Rapin is, perhaps, the main and appointed Helot of the neo-classic system. That system, instead of assembling all the great works of literary art, and giving an impartial hearing to each, takes one or two ancient treatises, themselves necessarily based upon but a partial examination, spins out of them a universal code, fills in that code, where it is wanting, with analogies and with perilous makeshifts of “decorum,” uniformity, and the like, and then proceeds to apply the result back to the actual works of 314art. It is no wonder that, even of the ancient division of these, hardly one escapes scot-free, except those which were originally composed by men of great, but not the greatest, genius, on a somewhat similar scheme. Elsewhere the unfortunate critic is constantly catching himself in those bushes which he has himself planted, and bruising himself against obstacles which he has elaborately set up. In a general way he grants that Homer is the greatest of poets; but the Fetiches of “Design” and “Decorum” extort from him the sacrifice of this in detail, and the acknowledgment that Homer is frequently most indecorous, and that large parts of him are out of drawing. And so of all.

Le Bossu (to whom the English sometimes give a superfluous final t, whom they generally defraud of his rightful “Le,” and whom in the main they know only from the locus classicus of Sterne)[396] reapproximates to the Aubignacian level. Le Bossu and the Abstract Epic. But it is fair to say that his dulness arises from a different cause. He is not, like Hédelin, a stupid man—he is distinctly the reverse—nor is he spiteful. He is merely the hardiest and most thoroughgoing devotee of a certain kind of abstract criticism. He does, of course, give us chapters on some actual illustrations of Heroic or Epic; but they are scarcely more necessary to his book than the picture-illuminations of a poem or a novel. Being a writer of some esprit, he sometimes exercises it in rather dangerous fictions—for instance, his imagined epic of Meridarpax, where all the mouse-stories (mouse and lion, town and country mouse, &c.) are worked in, would be most sprightly, if it did not look sprightlier still as an exercise in laughing at his own side. But by far the greater bulk, and the whole vertebration and solid substance, of his argument are devoted to Epic in the Abstract. Design, definition, and parts; good fables and bad fables; episodes; the biology, so to speak, of the Action, the narration, the manners and characters, not forgetting the 315Machines, and at last something on the Thoughts and Expression—which have about one-ninth of the whole. In short, if we have not exactly Epic in vacuo, we have it as a dried preparation. The complexity, anti-sensuousness, and dispassionate character of it are almost abashing; one feels at the end that, to hanker after an actual poem, be it Iliad or Orlando, has something sinful—something of the lust of the flesh.

We have said that Le Bossu is rather a sprightly person of a hyper-scholastic kind. Bouhours. His brother Father, Bouhours, is still more so; indeed, his famous inquiry, “Si un Allemand peut-être bel-esprit?[397] has got him rather into trouble with a prevailing party, in and out of Germany. Beginning with the Entretiens d’Ariste et d’Eugène (1671), a collection of chiefly verbal criticism on French writers, he continued it with other works in belles lettres and theology, the most important of which, to us, is La Manière de Bien Penser dans les Ouvrages d’Esprit (1687).[398] The book, which is not short, consists of four Dialogues between Eudoxe and Philanthe, “deux hommes de lettres (as the author remarks in a phrase to which Time has given a piquant new meaning) que la science n’a point gâtés.” Eudoxe, as the name indicates, is the author’s mouthpiece—a judicious admirer of the Ancients, who can yet tolerate such moderns as Voiture. Philanthe (also a speaking name) is a partisan of florid modernity, who is, however, so little of a “stalwart” that he gives up Ariosto, and intrenches himself behind Tasso and Lope. In the First dialogue Eudoxe censures (with abundant citation, as throughout the book) Equivoques, Hyperboles, pointes, concetti, and, generally, thoughts that are “not true.” The Second and Third, starting from Longinus and Hermogenes, discuss the true and the false in Sublimity and Wit: and the Fourth is mainly devoted to Obscurity. Bouhours (whose influence on subsequent critics, especially on Addison, was very great) writes agreeably, is free from rudeness and pedantry, and is altogether rather a favourable example of the school of Good Sense, quand même. But, 316as favourable examples of bad schools generally do, he damages his cause more than less favourable ones, because its drawbacks are more obvious and intrinsic. On his principles you must ostracise the best, the noblest, the most charming, the most poetic things in poetry. Et c’est tout dire.

As we approach the close of the chapter, we come upon classes and masses of work which is at once impossible to examine in particular and, as a whole, elusive. In Encyclopædias and Newspapers. 1687 appeared the Jugements des Savants[399] of Baillet, and ten years later the still more famous Dictionnaire Historique et Critique of Bayle, who had preluded it, from a time antecedent to that of Baillet’s publication, by Nouvelles de la République de Lettres, a regular literary review. Long before this latter the Journal des Savants[400] and the Mercure Galant[401] in France had provided criticism, good, bad, and indifferent, with regular outlets for itself. And in both kinds—that of the dictionary or encyclopædia, and that of the periodical—the flood has never ceased, but has always increased since. Fortunately for us the impossibility of treating all this is compensated by the fact that such treatment, if possible, would be superfluous. But of Bayle and Baillet at least something must be said particularly, and something also of a remarkable and much less known continuator of the latter.

Bayle perhaps needed nothing but better taste, greater freedom from prejudice, and a more exclusive bent towards purely literary criticism, to be one of the great literary critics of the world. Bayle. But, unluckily for himself, he had contracted, through corrupt following doubtless of the Latins (even such respectable persons as Pliny) and of the scholars of the Renaissance, a sort of perpetual itch and hankering 317after the indecent, which, to say nothing else, is as teasing and as tedious in the long-run as an itch for sermonising and a hankering after instruction. Equally tedious, and in much worse taste, is the perpetual undercurrent—not seldom becoming a very obvious top-flood—of sceptical girding and nagging at the Bible and at religion generally. In both these respects Bayle was followed by Voltaire. But Voltaire, though his own literary sympathies were perhaps not his strongest, had some. Of purely literary sympathies Bayle seldom shows much trace—by which it is not in the least meant that he is not a man of letters himself, for he is an excellent one, and the reproaches which have been addressed to his style are not of much importance. But it is not literature that he really loves: it is “philosophy” of a kind, and gossip of almost all kinds. His wits are always bright and alert, and his learning, though associated with so many qualities opposed to those of the mere pedant, and not impeccable, is pretty sound. He has the curiosity, the acuteness, the erudition, the industry of the true critic, but he has neither the enthusiasm, nor the disinterestedness, nor the grasp.

In both these respects, as in others, Baillet is very much a diminutive of him. Baillet. In fact, brightness of wit has almost disappeared; and though Ménage—himself no infallible guide—has been both ill-mannered and hypercritical in the strictures of the Anti-Baillet, there is no doubt that the Jugements des Savants is a book not to be used without verification on particular points. But this is almost a property, or, at worst, an inseparable accident, of these Collectanea; and a fair-minded reader cannot help admiring the extraordinary industry with which Baillet executed his task, while appreciating the significance of this record of a division of literature which, as we saw at the close of the last volume, had, scarcely two centuries before, the most meagre representation of all.[402]

318Curiously enough the want of judgment with which Baillet has been, and to some extent may justly be, reproached shows itself exactly in the most unlikely place. The ethos of a Critical Pedant. His opening volume on the nature, legitimacy, and so forth of Criticism, though too prolix, collects an extraordinary number of just and valuable things, and adds to them at least something of the author’s own. His Character of a Pedantic, Chicaning, Malicious Critic (partly borrowed from Le Bon, partly elaborated by himself) will be found at vol. i. p. 52., and has been justified by some seven generations of the persons it describes. It is Pedantry “to pick low and little faults, and to excite yourself over matters which are of no importance.” It is Pedantry “to steal from an author and insult him at the same time; to tear outrageously those who differ with you in opinion.” It is Pedantry “to endeavour to raise the whole world against some one who does not think enough of Cicero.” It is Pedantry “to take occasion by an author’s mistake to endeavour to humiliate him and ruin his reputation.” It is Pedantry “to send your author back in a haughty manner to the lowest class, and to menace him with whip and ferule for an error in chronology.” It is not merely Pedantry but Chicanery “to separate phrases in order to give them another sense,” to “impute printers’ errors,” to “neglect or change punctuation.” We need not go on to Baillet’s signs of “Malignity”: the cap is already a good cap, a very good cap, and one need not go far to find some one to wear it.

A boiling down of this volume—which, so far as I know, has never been executed—would be far superior to most general works on the subject with which I am acquainted. Nor is Baillet’s distribution of his scheme altogether a bad one. It is in the detailed carrying out (where one would suppose that for a man of such industry the least part of the difficulty lay) that he is most unsatisfactory. He neglects—in a manner surprising 319from one of that still scholastically educated generation of ecclesiastics, who were wont positively to abuse division and subdivision—the most obvious and mechanical assistances of method. His first sketch of subdivisions, though wanting succinctness, is not ill; but he never really carries it out, and stuffs in its stead long collections on “Precocious Persons,” “Authors in Disguise,” and “Les Anti (books of a polemic character with titles so beginning), which belong only to the curiosities of Criticism. Further, he never seems to have set out, in any of the divisions, with a preliminary list of the authors he meant to handle, so that his omissions and inclusions are equally surprising. And, lastly, he never seems to have worked out any preliminary calculus of the amount of space which such authors as he does admit proportionately deserve. But the extent of his knowledge is astounding, and the way in which he communicates it not disagreeable.

Baillet’s unmethodical prosecution of his task was in this fortunate for us that it induced a somewhat younger contemporary, Balthasar Gibert, to take up the rhetorical-critical side of his work, and continue it in a book[403] not very much known but of great value. Gibert. In strict date it belongs to the next century, and therefore to the next Book, but we have always taken, and shall always take, liberty of protracting or foreshortening our views as may be desirable; and this is avowedly a supplement to Baillet, though limited in subject, allowing, in consequence, fuller treatment of individuals, and displaying a good deal more originality and judgment. Gibert excellently supplies Baillet’s admitted insufficiency as to Longinus; he is very copious on Hermogenes, who had been coming, from Sturm downwards, into more and more estimation; and if in his accounts of the Italians he shows a traditional 320rather than an adequately comparative estimate,[404] he is sufficiently modern to give a quite considerable abstract of “M. Mackenze” (sic), i.e., Sir George Mackenzie’s Idea Eloquentiæ Forensis Hodiernæ. That he “but yaws neither” between Rhetoric and Criticism is a point of no importance against him; and it is a valuable document for the gradual transformation of the one into the other.

We have to terminate this chapter, as we shall have to begin the corresponding one in the next Book, by saying something on the famous—the much too famous—Battle of the Ancients and the Moderns; but the space which we shall give it on both occasions will appear strangely, and perhaps scandalously, short to some readers. The Ancient and Modern Quarrel. Neither idleness nor caprice, however, can be justly charged against the contraction. In the first place, things generally known may be justifiably passed with slighter notice in a continuous history, which has to deal with much that is very little known. From all sides, and in all ways, the Battle of the Ancients and Moderns is very well known indeed. It enjoys, and for more than a generation has enjoyed, the advantage of occupying one of the best monographs ever written. It engaged, on repeated occasions, the attention of the best equipped and the most readable of all French, if not of all, critics—Sainte-Beuve. It was arranged—not ill if not wholly well—for popular English consumption by the expert skill of Macaulay. As a result partly of Swift’s genuine literary sympathies, partly of his more or less accidental connections, the commentators of one of the greatest writers not only of England, but of the world, have been driven to expound it: as have, for more essential reasons, those of more than two or three great or interesting writers in France—Boileau, Perrault, Fontenelle, and others. From all this almost everybody must have learnt something about it, and to some of all this almost everybody can fairly be referred if he wishes to learn more.

For the matter is not really of so much importance in the History of Criticism as it may at first sight appear to possess. 321Its small critical value. These quarrels rarely do much critical good; for the critical issues are almost always obscured in them, first by the animus and prejudice of the combatants, and then by the mere dust of the fighting. But this particular combat did perhaps the least good of all; and could have done the least good. It was indeed sufficiently inevitable: for the sort of deification with which the whole of the sixteenth century, and most orthodox authority in the earlier seventeenth, had regarded antiquity, was sure to breed revolt. But it led to no conclusion; it evolved no truth. Truth is not the daughter of Ignorance; and it is really hard to say which party shows most ignorance in this matter. The defenders of the Ancients knew, as a rule, next to nothing of the Moderns; and the defenders of the moderns knew a great deal too little of the ancients. La Motte knew no Greek if Perrault[405] knew any; and with Boileau not only to all appearance was English literature a blank sheet, but almost the whole sheet of French literature before his own time was either blank or inscribed with fantastic fallacies. Still, this is not a condition entirely or commonly unknown in squabbles of this kind. The signal distinction and disqualification of the advocates in this famous cause is that, as a rule, neither any of the leaders, nor any of the juniors, had taken more than the slightest trouble to get up, or at least to understand, his own brief. The Ancients are here in a little better case than the Moderns; but they were not in so very much better case. Most of them knew the Latin classics fairly well; and some of them (though by no means all, or even many) had a fair, while a few had a good, acquaintance with Greek.[406] But, with rarest, if with any exceptions, they persisted in exaggerating, if not in contemplating solely, that side of Classical Literature which 322has been and must be admitted to be its principal side, but which is not the only one. They would not see—or if they saw, they expressed positive distaste for—the vaguer, more imaginative, more “Romantic” beauty of Greek, and in a less degree of Latin. They never dreamt of turning the tables on their antagonists, as they might have done to no inconsiderable extent, from this point of view. And by holding up Design, Order, Decorum, and the rest, as paramount conditions of literary excellence, they laid themselves open to the most inconvenient retorts from well-equipped adversaries, and even received some on the score of Homer, badly as their adversaries were equipped as a rule.

On the other hand, the Moderns were, for the most part, like men who have Toledos by their sides and choose to fight with cabbage-plants. The French ignored the English and sneered at the Italians and Spaniards since the Renaissance, indulging the while in placid but contemptuous ignorance or misrepresentation of everything before it out of Italy. The English were prepared to admit that nobody had achieved sweetness in English numbers before Mr Waller, apologised (except Dryden and Dryden only in a few moments) for Shakespeare, and thought Chaucer a good funny old savage.

Out of such a welter of blundering little good could come, and no good came save one. It is, I believe, absolutely impossible to trace, in so much as one single filament, the extension and deepening of critical appreciation which began in the next century to the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns. But that quarrel did excite and feed the critical spirit and appetite, and did give signs of an as yet half-blind craving for the possession of critical knowledge.[407]


292. I am not aware of any History of the subject of this Book as a whole: nor even of any devoted to French seventeenth-century Criticism extensively but exclusively. The nearest thing to this latter is M. Bourgoin’s excellent Les Maîtres de la Critique au 17ème Siècle (Paris, 1889), giving studies of Malherbe, Chapelain, Saint-Evremond, Boileau, and La Bruyère. For the inevitable, though tedious, quarrel of Ancients and Moderns, H. Rigault’s book on the subject (Paris, 1859) is, and is likely to remain, a standard. Monographs are, of course, innumerable; and the very large proportionate space given in the usual French literary histories to this period, makes these specially pertinent. Two of the largest volumes of M. Petit de Julleville’s book, for instance—with ample bibliographies—contain the seventeenth century only.

293. Felt rather than acknowledged, it is true. We by no means uncommonly find hard words used of Scaliger, whose Homerophobia shocked orthodox French critics of this time more than his Virgiliomania conciliated them. Yet they owed him almost everything.

294. Enfin Malherbe vint. The edition in the Grands Ecrivains, by M. Ludovic Lalanne (5 vols., Paris, 1862-69), is not only by far the best, but in our case indispensable, as giving the full commentary on Desportes.

295. The Historiette of Tallemant (ed. Monmerqué, i. 236-278) is apparently based upon a fuller version of Racan, and must be compared.

296. In the Ninth Satire (v. infra). Regnier was Desportes’ nephew, and is said by the anecdotists (see last note) to have been incensed against Malherbe, not merely by the latter’s literary opposition to his uncle, but by a piece of gross rudeness of Malherbe’s to Desportes in the latter’s own house, where Regnier himself had introduced him.

297. The French critics, however, have perhaps taken too literally his reported blasphemy, that he did not value a good poet above a good player at ninepins. Malherbe was a Norman—that is to say, a parcel-Englishman—and may well have had something of that English humour of disparaging his own matters which is so incomprehensible to the French.

298. The version in Tallemant adds that he disliked Virgil. He also scoffed at the idea of “number” (rhythm) in prose.

299. Ed. Lalanne, iv. 249-473. There is an elaborate and standard monograph on this by M. Brunot, La Doctrine de Malherbe (Paris, 1891); but, as in other cases, I am obliged to postpone the comment to the text.

300. There are things of Castelvetro’s in the Opere Varie not wholly dissimilar; but these were then unpublished.

301. I have sometimes wondered whether the fact that, according to the Racan-Tallemant anecdote, Malherbe only “struck through” his copy of Ronsard without annotating it, is not an involuntary testimony to the Prince of Poets. Malherbe, for all his rancour and narrowness, was no fool; and he must in his mind have anticipated a famous later sentence about the eagle floating

“Beyond the arrows, shouts, and views of men.”

Desportes is not exactly an eagle, and Malherbe has better game with him, but still not the best of the game.

302. Not to be confounded with the critic and versifier, René Rapin, who was not born till after Regnier’s death, and whom to call “favourite, &c.,” would indeed have been a dreadful thing to do; still less with the historian Rapin de Thoyras, who was a generation later again. This Rapin was Nicolas, part author of the glorious Satire Menippée, victor in the burlesque contest of the Flea (see Southey’s Doctor), a good versifier in Latin, and no ill one in French, though he was of the (in France not very numerous) partisans of classical metres. He died in 1608, not long after the date of this satire.

303. I read my Regnier in two editions, both very desirable as books, and of different merits otherwise. The one, that of Prosper Poitevin (Paris, 1860), is very compact; and, besides other matter, has the old commentary of Brossette, which is extremely interesting as expressing the views of a disciple of Boileau on a poet whom, to do him justice, Boileau could not but admire, though he characteristically belittled him. The other, that of E. Courbet (Paris, 1875), has a text adjusted in the scrupulous modern manner, and some important additions to the biography.

304. For instance, the yoking of Virgil, Tasso, and Ronsard. This Pisgah-sight of literature was what the Renaissance, and the whole neo-classic period, almost invariably failed to attain.

305. There was, however, a remnant. Even Balzac called him “Le tyran des mots et des syllabes;” even Chapelain recognised (acutely enough) the fact that his methods were rhetorical rather than poetical; even Tallemant practically summed him up, once and for all, in the words, “Il n’avait pas beaucoup de génie: la méditation et l’art l’ont fait poëte.” But the majority and the hour were with him.

306. Those who wish for something more on this subject, without attacking Vaugelas for themselves, may be strongly recommended to the full and excellent article of M. Brunot in Petit de Julleville (vi. 674-690), one of the very best papers in the book.

307. He is often called this, but not quite fairly, for he was born in Bresse.

308. For other grammarian-rhetoricians of 1610-1660 see M. Brunot as above. On the Art Poétique of P. de Deimier (1610), compare also Rücktaschel ubi sup.

309. He was born in Angoulême.

310. Pp. 509-689 of the second of two stately folios (Paris, 1665). The Letters are in the first.

311. Balzac himself rather mincingly deprecates this word. “Je ne donne” he says to Chapelain (XX. 25) “jamais de jugement; mais je dis quelquefois mon avis.”

312. With this it is interesting to compare the disquisition written to Balzac, and apparently at his request, De Ludicra Dictione (opening his Opera, fol., Amst., 1709) by François Vavasseur, a Jesuit Professor, who also wrote not a bad book on Epigrams and some other literary work, besides sermons and theological treatises. Vavasseur is at once refreshingly logical and audacious. The Greeks (he is bold enough even to face the retort of “Aristophanes”?) did not use ludicra dictio or burlesque language. Nor did the Romans: for Lucilius desideratur (scarcely so much as to warrant the conclusion to those who know the fragments well), and as for Petronius and Apuleius, decent people never mention them. Secondly, the ancient critics give no precepts for it. Thirdly, there is no reason for using it. Fourthly, there are many reasons for not using it. So that is settled. One may like Vavasseur.

313. Some authorities give this as the anagram, the other as the name. But it does not in the least matter.

314. The Pleiad tragedies (v. supra, p. 127) had been Senecan, but not quite “regular”; and though Hardy broke loose from Time and Place, it was not always very violently.

315. Ogier, like his Italian predecessors, is firm on the pleasure-giving quality of dramatic art. His manner is well illustrated by his remark that the constant arrival of messengers is more suitable to a good inn than to a good tragedy. One wonders whether he knew the Spaniards (v. inf. ch. 2).

316. His mother was deeply devoted to this school, and had in her youth known Ronsard personally. The gibing part of the anecdote about the author of the Pucelle being “bred a poet” was never very funny, and is now more than very stale. The historical part remains and flourishes.

317. It is formally the Academy’s and not his. But there is no real doubt that nearly all of it expresses his sentiments, and that much of it is actually his in language. The whole history of the Cid dispute is minute and complicated, and may be found in many books. The persons chiefly responsible for it, besides Richelieu and Chapelain, were Georges de Scudéry, an eccentric failure of a genius, Mairet, a playwright of talent, and Claveret, one of none. In all cases, it is to be feared, the extraordinary success of the piece was the exciting cause.

318. Of course there is much to be said for them, rightly understood, from the point of view of mere theatrical arrangement: while mediocre writers are more safely to be trusted with than without them. But we are speaking of literature, not the theatre; and in literature the weak brother is rather a nuisance to be extirpated, than a person to be provided for, or conceded to.

319. M. Jules Lemaître’s article on the subject in Petit de Julleville (iv. 273 sq.) most ingenuously cites the virtuous authority of M. Dumas fils in support of Chapelain, and is not far from opining in the same sense. It is always difficult for a Frenchman to pardon an honest love. If Chimène had been married and Rodrigue her gallant, it would have been quite different. She might have overlooked the blood of 20,000 fathers.

320. De la lecture des Vieux Romans, ed. Feillet, Paris, 1870. Unfortunately printed in very small numbers, but still obtainable for less than half its weight in silver.

321. It is really refreshing to find Mr. Burke saying ditto to M. Chapelain some 150 years afterwards, in a sentence as well known to all the world as that in the text is unknown to all but a few.

322. S’il faut qu’un Jeune Homme soit Amoureux. Sarrasin, Œuvres, ed. cit. inf., 139-235.

323. Mémoires de la Société de l’Histoire, vol. xxi., Paris, 1894.

324. This, with other things, will be found in Chapelain’s Mélanges de Littérature (Paris, 1726).

325. Tennyson paid almost greater heed to his critics in detail; but he never made any formal or general concession.

326. They will be found in all good editions. I always use the best, that of M. Marty-Laveaux, where the Discours appear conveniently, if chronologically out of place, in Vol. I, and the Examens, each at the head of its own play.

327. Let me, for one has always to guard these things, observe that no charge is here brought against the Agamemnon, which is perhaps the greatest tragedy in the world out of Shakespeare, and almost worthy to be ranked with Shakespeare’s best. It is of the folly of the commentators that Corneille was, and that I (quam longo intervallo post Cornelium!) am thinking.

328. Art Poét., p. 233. “Si toutefois la Fable est telle que le Poëte n’ait pas lieu d’y recompenser la Vertu, il doit pour le moins faire en sorte que les Personnes vertueuses soient louées publiquement.”

329. In his Œuvres (Paris, 1694), pp. 301-344.

330. This is very interesting in connection with Sarrasin’s appearance in Chapelain’s dialogue and his own other work (v. supra, p. 260).

331. Scudéry thinks Four things necessary to Epic—the authority of History, the observance of received Religion, the exercise of Poetic Licence in Fiction, and the provision of Great Events. He is not uninteresting for his connection with his sister’s prose Romances in which he had some, if not much, share, and which he never forgets. Also, he clings to the Pléiade technicalities to some extent—kindly, however, explaining such words as Hune, Quille (which, he says rather quaintly, is un bois courbé qui est au plus bas d’un vaisseau), and Calfater. The Ibrahim preface, thirteen years earlier, exhibits the same obliging explanation of technicalities, and the same virtuous adherence to The Rules. “Provided,” he says, “that an Architect takes his measures right, he is assured of the beauty of his building,” which would seem to dissuade any one from advancing beyond the packing-case style of architecture. And he is sure that a Romance, like an Epic, should never go beyond one year in time.

332. De Poemate Epico. Paris, 4to, 1652.

333. Aliquantum furoris aspergi non negaverim.De Poem. Ep., p. 269.

334. Neque, tamen si quis atra polleat bile ... continuo is in poetis censendus est, nisi accesserit disciplina, &c.—Ibid., post.

335. There is no absolutely complete and authentic edition—that of Desmaiseaux (frequently reprinted in the fifty years after the author’s death, from 3 vols. 4to at London, 1705, to 12 vols. 12mo at Paris, 1753) was at least authorised. The critical matter will be found well arranged in the 2nd vol. of Giraud’s Œuvres Mêlées de Saint-E. (3 vols., Paris, 1865). I may refer to an essay of mine, first published in the Fortnightly Review for July 1879, and reprinted in Miscellaneous Essays (2nd ed., London, 1895).

336. V. inf., p. 385 note.

337. Ed. Réveillé, Paris, 3 vols. (Paris and London, 1846).

338. Ed. cit., i. 340, 354; ii. 35, 321.

339. “Certainement il faut en louer Dieu,” says his editor, himself a doctor, with a kind of shudder, in reference to Patin’s pious gratitude for the recovery of a colleague whom he had bled thirty-two times. His exploits in the direction of ensuita purgare are too appalling to particularise.

340. In the 8th satire. He had the extremely small grace, however, to drop the name in later editions, and it does not now appear.

341. If the “Vadius” of the Femmes Savantes is Ménage. He himself denied it rather cleverly; but there is not much doubt.

342. See what he says on Castelvetro in the Ménagiana (ed. La Monnoye, Amsterdam, 1713), ii. 86.

343. Ibid., ii. 174.

344. See, for instance, in the otherwise trivial Chevræana, a rather amusing string (p. 157) of criticisms passed on the great authors of antiquity; in the Fureteriana (p. 13), an acute and most just remark on the folly of versifying scientific treatises and other things not in the least suitable for the process; and not a few in Vigneul-Marville—the absence of notes and justificatory citations in ancient historians (ii. 116); the praise of Amyot (ib. 132); the question of fully or partially formed verse in prose (ib. 188 sq.); remarks on Sforza Pallavicini’s Trattato dello stilo (ib. 260); on “rhyme and reason” (ib. 330). (The references in this note and in the above paragraphs of the text, except where otherwise indicated, are to the collection of Ana in ten vols. Amsterdam and Paris, An vii.)

345. Ed. cit., ii. 87.

346. P. 234, Ce travail m’a toujours paru bas, et peu digne de l’estime qu’il s’est attirée, et de l’application d’un esprit noble et élevé.

347. P. 20 and passim.

348. P. 33.

349. P. 31.

350. Not in the general edition above cited. My copy is that of Cologne, 1695, with no printer’s name, but with a nice red and black title-page, an agreeable frontispiece (representing Joseph Justus, in a chair and a long beard, addressing attentive standing periwig-pated persons), and (as a MS. note of a former possessor informs me) a great deal of matter not in any other ed.

351. Also not in the collection. My copy is the Amsterdam edition, 2 vols., 1699.

352. The suggestion of this, though not the exact phrase, will be found in Sainte-Beuve’s essay (Causeries du Lundi, v. 275).

353. Paris, 1675.

354. On all these, see Tallemant, Bayle, and others down to Sainte-Beuve. For a typical literary and critical quarrel, beginning politely and ending in something like Billingsgate, nothing can be better than that battle of Costar and M. de Girac, first over the dead body of Voiture and the live one of Balzac, and then over both these departed, which Sainte-Beuve tells in his liveliest manner at pp. 210-231 of the 12th vol. of the Causeries.

355. To those who are acquainted with the most interesting handling of Desmarets in M. Rigault’s so often cited book (Querelle des Anc. et Mod., pp. 80-103), my reference to him may seem too low and little. As a matter of fact, I think rather better of Desmarets than M. Rigault did. But the latter’s purpose of enlarging—I do not say exaggerating—his portraits of everybody who had to do with the “quarrel” sometimes, I think, throws them a little out of proportion, if not of focus, for a general critical history. His chapter, however, is excellent, if not quite just; and it should have by itself sufficed to save those who will not read originals from a blunder into which some writers have fallen—that of crediting Desmarets with the first vindication of the Christian epic, and the first denunciation of heathen mythology as a poetic stuff. The mere name of Tasso ought to suffice as a reminder of the falsity of this; the work of Gambara (v. supra, p. 107 note), though I cannot speak of it at first hand, must be got out of the way by them; and Vauquelin de la Fresnaye (v. supra, p. 131) had in France itself made the way plain, for the author of Clovis. But he certainly drew a good bow in this not too happy battle; and if he takes any pleasure in the progeniture, he may probably claim John Dennis (v. infra, p. 436) as his son. That Boileau’s treatment of him was quite unfair M. Rigault himself fully admits; but to whom and to what (including those talents of his own which he by turns prostitutes and cripples) is Boileau not unfair?

356. As this of the very authors he censures, “Leurs paroles, toutes mortes qu’elles sont, ont plus de vigueur que la raison de certaines gens.” II. 300, Ed. J. Simon, Paris, 1871.

357. The literary Pensées of Pascal are still fewer, and in dealing with Montaigne he is even further from the literary point of view than Malebranche. His chief utterance is a piece of characteristic scorn at poetical clichés like bel astre, fatal laurier, &c.

358. Of the immense number (estimated years ago at nearly five hundred) of editions of the Works in whole or part, that of Berriat de Saint-Prix in 4 vols., 1830-34, is, I believe, as nearly the standard as any. There is, however, a magnificent modern edition of the Œuvres Poétiques, edited by M. Brunetière (Paris, 1889), which I am glad to possess. The ordinary “Collection” editions, such as that of Garnier, though complete enough on the verse side, are apt to omit what they think the less interesting pieces of prose.

359. He was thirty-three when he began it, and thirty-eight when it was finished. A very excellent separate edition of it is that of the Cambridge University Press, by Mr D. Nichol Smith (1898).

360. Boileau did not merely “convey” from the ancients. He had the specially ugly, though not so specially uncommon, trick of insulting a man and stealing from him at the same time. (Cf. Théophile Gautier’s article, in Les Grotesques, on his namesake.)

361.

C’est en vain qu’au Parnasse un témeraire auteur,
Pense de l’art des vers attendre la hauteur.

362. It may be sometimes forgotten in the quotation of this famous line, that long poem was a technical term in French criticism, from the days of the Pléiade downwards, and means definitely an Epic, or Heroic Poem, not a long piece of verse. It is characteristic of Boileau to hit backwards at the modern epic, of which he was no admirer, in this rather treacherous praise of the sonnet, towards which he was equally lukewarm.

363. As it takes ten lines (171-180) in the French to explain our single epithet, they need not make fun of it.

364. See on the Petronian passage, vol. i. p. 245, and on its mischievous influence the present chapter, passim.

365. I like to vary Boileau’s stale criticism with his admirably fresh and vigorous verse.

366. “She can do without them,” as L. Arruntius most excellently remarked on a parallel occasion. Vide i. 238.

367. As usual Boileau gives the actual names of half a score inhabitants of the French Grub Street, of whom Cyrano de Bergerac (he was long dead, and Boileau was safe) has the consolation prize of being merely fou.

368. They were probably the tribut légitime which a noble esprit might derive from his work.

369. This refers to the son, François (1628-1680), of a more poetic pair—Guillaume (1598-1659) and Claudine Colletet. The former of these was also a critic in his way, and left, besides an Art Poétique (1658) of no great value, a Histoire des Poètes Français which, strangely enough, was never printed, and the MS. of which was burnt by the Vandals of the Commune in 1871.

370. A humourist might maintain the two opposite theses, “That Boileau has genuine authority,” and “That the French are always craving for a tyrant,” on the strength of a curious catena of evidence from Voltaire’s “Ça porte malheur” to Marmontel, who had presumed to speak lightly of Despréaux, down to M. Bourgoin’s “On a difficilement raison contre Boileau.” But to those who “bear an English heart” these terrors are idle.

371. It is interesting and significant that Boileau’s defenders generally drop “Good Sense,” and use, whenever they can, the more ambiguous and high-sounding “Reason.” It is sufficient to say that their author repeats “Good Sense” again and again, and obviously uses Reason as a mere synonym for it.

372. If I have seemed, or may seem, too bitter in any remarks on Boileau, let me here observe that few things in literary history are more pathetic than these last years of his, when, ultimus suorum, amid the ruins of the political glories which he had celebrated, and in a transition period between the great literature of the seventeenth century and that of the eighteenth, with no one but his foolish Boswell-Eckermann, Brossette, to comfort him, and no one at all to whom to look as his successor, he held—unconquered and unconquerable—to his principles, and died, as one of the poets to whom he was so unjust had said,

“Sans bouger, debout et dans son rang.”

373. That he had taught Racine rimer difficilement is the well-known boast in that uncomplimentary comparison of his pupil with Corneille, by which he appears to have administered a sort of private unction to his soul to atone for his public injustice.injustice.

374. Not of course Boileau’s worthy predecessor in Art-Poetic writing (v. supra, pp. 117, 118), but an advocate of the mid-seventeenth century, who was unfortunate enough to commit sonnets, and to be disliked by the satirist.

375. Even his admirers admit his strange ignoring of the fact that Madeleine de Scudéry intended her personages to be modern—that they were mere disguises of Condé and others, not attempts to re-create antiquity. This of course does not exempt them from blame; but it requires a different sort of blame.

376. The condescending praise of “Arioste et ses fables comiques,” in A. P., iii. 291, can hardly be regarded as a set-off, especially as just before (l. 218) he had stigmatised him, emphasising the stigma by a note, as “follement idolâtre et païen.”

377. Written in 1700 and published next year. Letter vi. of the ordinary collection.

378. The First and Sixth Satires are a little, and some smaller pieces much, earlier than this, but they are indecisive and unimportant.

379. Cf. Bolæana. On the other hand, the Rev. J. Garbett, whom anti-Tractarian feeling made Professor of Poetry at Oxford when Isaac Williams was a candidate, has “Bollevian” (De Re Critica Prælectiones, Oxford, 1847, Præl. iv. i.) I am not bigoted on the point.

380. “Greek, the Alpha and Omega of all knowledge,” as Dr Folliott calls it, is certainly not less so in criticism than elsewhere.

381. By M. Bourgoin in the interesting book cited above.

382. Editions again innumerable; but none, I think, can compare with that of M. Servois in the Grands Écrivains de la France (Paris, 1865-1882).

383. “Entre toutes les différentes expressions qui peuvent rendre une seule de nos pensées il n’y en a qu’une qui soit la bonne,” &c.—Ed. cit., i. 118.

384. It is a pity that in the best modern account known to me, that of M. Bourgoin, the question of Fénelon’s character and of his relations with Bossuet is brought in. It is really quite extraneous to the matter. Very favourable reference can be made to the notice by the Cardinal de Bausset, prefixed to the most accessible edition of Fénelon’s critical work (in Œuvres Choisies, Paris, Garnier, n.d.) Bausset, who wrote, besides an extensive life of Fénelon, one of Bossuet, and died in 1824, came before the Renaissance of criticism in France: but he was no perruque.

385. P. 125 ed. cit.

386. “L’excès choquant de Ronsard nous a un peu jetés dans l’extrémité opposée; on a appauvri, desséché et gâté notre langue.” And he proceeds, with much humour and more truth, to stigmatise the prim following of grammar, the “substantive hand in hand with its adjective,” the verb “walking behind with an adverb at its heels, and an accusative in a place unalterable.” “C’est ce,” this great locus continues, “qui exclut toute suspension d’esprit, toute surprise, toute variété, et souvent toute magnifique cadence.” 1830 could say no more; and often said it with less authority.

387. Zénobie boasted herself to be impeccably “regular.” The Prince observed that he was much obliged to the Abbé for paying such attention to Aristotle, but that he could not excuse Aristotle for making the Abbé write such a tragedy. This famous mot, like others, is of disputed attribution. It is sometimes given to the Prince de Rohan-Guémené.

388. A work of youth which appeared as early as 1627. Hédelin was never elected to the Academy; and in 1664 endeavoured to start a new one of his own from a coterie which he, in imitation of Conrart, had formed. But “Trajan was” not “content,” wisely enough: and France was spared a skim-milk Forty.

389. It forms the first volume of the Amsterdam edition, in 3 vols. (1715), of Hédelin’s critical work. The second and third, which are together about the size of the first, include the extensive and dismal lucubrations on Terence, &c.

390. Who translated (with a preface not virulently Rymerical, v. infra, p. 392) Rapin’s Reflections upon Poetry almost as soon as it appeared. Rapin was a copious theologian, an elegant and fertile Latin versifier. Of his critical works in French, the Comparaisons noted above were produced annually between 1668 and 1671, except the “Thucydides and Livy,” which appeared ten years later. The Réflexions sur l’Eloquence date from 1672: those, more famous, on Poetics and Poets, from 1674. His critical Works were early collected, and the complete collection appeared in English, by various hands, including Rymer’s, in 2 vols. (London, 1706). The Amsterdam ed. of the original (3 vols., 1709-10) contains, in addition, a small treatise, Du Grand et du Sublime, which must not be neglected, and some others, together with the Comparaison de Pindare et d’Horace of the architect Blondel.

391. Chap. vii. In the preceding chapter there is one of those sentences which ruin this kind of criticism, by and of themselves. “Games are of the number of those actions which may occur in the lives of heroes.” Most certainly: but one feels that Rapin said it simply because there are games in Homer and Virgil, and that, if there had not been, he would probably have said, “Games are not,” &c.

392. “Cette Princesse oublie sa pudeur pour écouter sa compassion....” In the rest of the clause the English translator softens the crudity of the French curiosité. But it is still more pleasant to oppose to the nasty niceness of the French Jesuit the words of the author of The Christian Year: “Nausicaa—cujus persona nihil usquam aut venustius habet aut pudentius veterum Poesis” (Præl. xii. vol. i. p. 195, Oxford, 1844).

393. Mais la pudeur ni toutes les bienséances extérieures n’y sont point blessées.

394. So the English: Fr. “femme de bien.” I like to read Rapin in both versions, contemporary as they are, and antiphonal of the sentiment of the time, in its two chief languages.

395. These latter are mostly from the Réflexions sur la Poétique (Œuvres, ii. 175 sq.) It is quite at the beginning of these that the unlucky charge against Dante of “wanting fire” (see i. 175 note) occurs; it is followed later, and perhaps to some extent explained, if not excused, by the further criticism that he has “l’air trop profond,” “une ordonnance triste et morne.”

396. Tristram Shandy, iii. 12. He was not always unknown among us. Dryden, whether out of modesty, fashion, or humour, takes leave to call him “the best of modern critics,” and he was translated in 1695. The mistakes referred to above are all the worse because there was actually a French writer named Bossut, a mathematician of distinction in the eighteenth century.

397. Not, as it is constantly quoted, peut avoir de l’esprit. It will be observed that the difference is considerable.

398. My copy is the 2nd ed. of next year in 12mo.

399. The standard edition is that of La Monnoye (7 vols. 4to, Paris, 1722, with an 8th containing Ménage’s Anti-Baillet &c.)

400. Jan. 1665—first weekly, then monthly. It became a government publication in 1701. Gui Patin, in the March after its appearance, is very angry (Let. DCLXV. iii. 517, ed. cit. sup.) with it, and says with voice prophetic of many injured ones to come, “nous verrons si ces prétendus censeurs, sine suffragio populi et Quiritium, auront le crédit et l’autorité de critiquer ainsi tous ceux qui n'écriront pas à leur goût.

401. 1672-1820. Donneau de Visé was its first editor, and Thomas Corneille its most distinguished writer.

402. It can scarcely be necessary to give bricks of so large and rambling a house. “Mr Borrichius témoigne aussi que le style [of Ovid’s Heroides] est fort pur” is, and has to be, the kind of thing. Perhaps such a glut of authorities may have insensibly nauseated men of authority, and so Baillet may have worked both ways. He is good enough to admit (v. 461) that “one cannot say this nation [the English] is inferior even for Poetry to several others of the North,” and he has heard of “Abraham Cowley, John Downe ou Jean Donne, Cleveland, Edmond, [sic] Waller, Jean Denham, George Herbert, le Chancelier Bacon, Shakespeare, Fletcher, Beaumont, Ben, Johnson, Suckling, Jean Milton,” &c. It is open to Shaconians to contend that as the comma at “Edmond” is undoubtedly superfluous, so is that at “Bacon,” and that Baillet—the learned Baillet—meant to rank “le Chancelier Bacon-Shakespeare” among poets.

403. Jugements des Savants sur les auteurs qui ont traité de la Rhétorique (3 vols., Paris, 1703-16). M. Bourgoin, I think, refers to Gibert, but the book was first brought seriously to my notice by a very kind private communication from Professor Scott of the University of Michigan. Luckily it is in the British Museum; but it does not seem easy to obtain a copy for oneself. Gibert taught for some half-century in the Collége Mazarin, and was repeatedly rector of the University of Paris. He wrote other books,—a formal “Rhetoric” juxta Aristotelis doctrinam, strictures on Rollin, &c. Gibert is, it seems, appended to some edd. of Baillet.

404. See, for instance, his reference to Patrizzi, who is evidently to him rather magni nominis umbra than anything tangible.

405. His Parallèle des Anciens et des Modernes (1688-98) is most disappointing, even to fervent opponents of “the sect of the Nicolaitans” and fervent lovers of the Contes de ma Mère l’Oye. That he knew little and that his case was bad does not matter; but I at least cannot find the esprit which apologists plead.

406. J. Warton (Adventurer, No. 49) asserts, on the authority of Ménage, that even Rapin was “totally ignorant” of Greek. M. does not quite say this: but he does say that R. got his Greek quotations from Tanneguy-Lefèvre, Madame Dacier’s father (Ménagiana, i. 175 of the collected ed.)

407. Perhaps it is still desirable, though almost for the last time, to observe that the omission of casual criticism in non-critical work is intentional and necessary. Nowhere could more interesting examples of it, from Molière downwards, be produced; but this is only a temptation, not a reason.

323

CHAPTER II.

THE ITALIAN DECADENCE AND THE SPANIARDS.

DECADENCE OF ITALIAN CRITICISM—PAOLO BENI—POSSEVINO: HIS ‘BIBLIOTHECA SELECTA’—TASSONI: HIS ‘PENSIERI DIVERSI’—AROMATARI—HIS ‘DEGLI AUTORI DEL BEN PARLARE’—BOCCALINI AND MINORS—INFLUENCE OF THE RAGGUAGLI—THE SET OF SEICENTIST TASTE—SPANISH CRITICISM: HIGHLY RANKED BY DRYDEN?—THE ORIGINS: VILLENA—SANTILLANA—ENCINA—VALDÉS—THE BEGINNING OF REGULAR CRITICISM: HUMANIST RHETORICIANS—POETICS: RENGIFO—PINCIANO—LA CUEVA—CARVALLO—GONZALES DE SALAS—THE ‘CIGARRALES’ OF TIRSO DE MOLINA—LOPE’S ‘ARTE NUEVO,’ ETC.—HIS ASSAILANTS AND DEFENDERS—THE FIGHT OVER THE SPANISH DRAMA—CERVANTES AND CALDERON—GONGORISM, CULTERANISM, ETC.—QUEVEDO—GRACIAN—THE LIMITATIONS OF SPANISH CRITICISM.

That the Italians, who had some half of the last Book to themselves, will not have a tithe of the present, is due, on the part of the historian, neither to laziness, nor to love of contrast, nor to that rather illogical and illegitimate generosity which decrees that “the other citizen shall have his turn.” Decadence of Italian Criticism. The disproportion simply corresponds to the facts. Italy, indeed, continued to devote herself with something like enthusiasm—or at least with the engouement of dilettantism and the doggedness of pedantry—to critical studies. Some at least of the earlier writers of the century—aftercrops of the sixteenth—still exercised considerable influence: and for nearly the whole of the time the great Italians of the former age—Scaliger, Castelvetro, and others—maintained an authority which did not pass to France till the eighteenth itself was approaching. But little was really added 324to the critical canon of the central Peninsula. Paradoxers like Beni, eccentrics of different kinds like Tassoni and Boccalini, respectable compilers like Possevino and Aromatari, must occupy us and receive their due. But all these belong more or less to the first quarter of the century. The second, third, and fourth are much less fertile, and it is not till another meeting of the ages that we shall come to another really remarkable group, consisting of two at least painful literary historians, among the earliest of their kind, in Crescimbeni and Quadrio, of a real though limited critic in Gravina, and of a remarkable combination of erudition and insight in Muratori. And these will properly be treated in the next Book, not in this.

Paolo Beni, who has been spoken of in the last Book,[408] and who was a man of nearly fifty when the sixteenth century closed, had nevertheless nearly half his literary life to spend in the seventeenth, and published the most noteworthy of his works at this time. Paolo Beni. We saw that he was a strong “Torquatist,” and an innovator in respect of recommending prose for tragedy as well as for comedy. As he grew older the iconoclastic tendency so developed in him that he may almost be called the leader of Rebellion in the matter of the Ancient and Modern Quarrel; for questa lite, as a contemporary of Beni’s calls it, had been fought out in Italy long before it became a burning one in France and England. Beni was a “modern” of the extravagant kind: and his two chief critical manifestoes, after the Dissertation on Prose Drama, were a Comparatione di Homero Virgilio e Torquato,[409] where the author of the Gerusalemme (which Beni prefers to call by its other title, Goffredo) is exalted far above both the ancient Poets; and an Anti-Crusca,[410] in which, with the futile courage of his opinions, he gives no more quarter to Dante and Petrarch than to Homer and Virgil on the score of language at least, and would apparently turn “modernity” almost into “hodiernity.” This does not argue any great critical spirit: and we find little in Beni—only the sort of Old Bailey advocacy, or attack, which was rapidly coming to be the disgrace of criticism. There is not “the real integrity 325and perfection of the fable” in the Odyssey. Even Virgil cannot approach Tasso in regularity, nice derangement of episodes, &c., &c. The most amusing thing about Beni is the way in which he turns the batteries of the classics on themselves. He does not attempt to make a new Poetic for Romances, nor does he take his favourite poem on its own merits and extol it for them. The “parts,” the “qualities,” the “rules” are practically adopted: and it is shown—or at least asserted—that Tasso exhibits them all in greater perfection than the ancients. This is the line afterwards taken by Addison with Paradise Lost.

The Bibliotheca Selecta of Antonio Possevino, Jesuit negotiator and teacher, is a good example of the kind of compiling work which the great development of Criticism was imposing on at least some critics. Possevino. His Bibliotheca Selecta. From some points of view it also may seem to belong rather to the last Book, for Possevino, who retired from active work in many countries to his native land and an old age of study in 1586, brought it out first at Rome in 1593. But he made alterations and rearrangements in it afterwards, and the edition I have used[411] was published, with his own approval and assistance, a few years before his death, and well within the seventeenth century. It is a mighty folio (or rather two in one) dealing with something like the whole range of studies, and intended, it would seem, rather for teachers than learners; but the First Book[412] has something, and the three last much, to do with our subject. In these three Possevino successively discusses History at enormous length[413] and with considerable bibliographical information, Poetry[414] at somewhat less, and finally the Art of Letter Writing, under the special title of “Cicero,” but with reference also to Libanius and others. Possevino, as was in fact inevitable from his profession and his purpose, is very much cumbered about orthodoxy and morality, especially in the poetical department; but he does not allow himself to be wholly guided by these considerations. Scaliger’s Poetic he 326calls spissum sane opus—a happy but rather ambiguous epithet; quotes Gambara, Minturno, Cinthio, Pigna, and Patrizzi as main authorities, and though he says that he will not quote Castelvetro, as being on the Index, evidently means that he should be read, though he duly prescribes Caro as an antidote. He has a good selection of extracts, mighty lists of books and authorities, and an inserted tract (two in fact) by Macarius Mutius on Poetry and Christian Poetry, by which he sets much store, but in which little will be found but rhetoric.

Some of the most interesting and suggestive, if not the most regular, criticism in this part of Italian literature is to be found in the Pensieri Diversi of Alessandro Tassoni.[415] Tassoni. His Pensieri Diversi. The author of the Secchia Rapita was not likely to be dull in anything that he undertook: and his undertakings were of a sufficiently various kind.[416] In his Considerazioni[417] on Petrarch he treated that revered sonneteer and his sonnets as cavalierly as he was to treat the sacred Heroic Poem in the Secchia: but this kind of frondeur spirit was nothing new in Italy. The Pensieri, in which their author was candidly prepared to find people discovering “extravagance and capriciousness,” are modelled on Aristotle’s Problems, and Plutarch’s Symposiacs and Roman Questions. They deal with curious matters “such as are wont to come into the discourse of Gentlemen and Professors of Literature,” a phrase where the “and” is half complimentary and half the reverse. On perusing the contents we find that gentlemen and professors of literature talk about the radical humours, and the reason of the spots on the moon, and why it is that ugly ladies are loved, and a very great many other interesting things. They do it, moreover (at least Tassoni does it for them), in a very interesting manner—that peculiar early seventeenth-century mixture of learning, fancy, and humour which, in still greater measure, gives Burton and Browne their quintessenced charm. If Tassoni had pushed 327that question about the donne brutte home, he might have rediscovered, against his own age, the great secret of criticism; but of this we may treat more properly in the Interchapter. It is not till the Tenth Book of the Pensieri that he attacks literature, save by incidence and tangent; and then he plunges full into the Battle of the Ancients and Moderns, devoting twenty-seven out of twenty-eight chapters to an elaborate comparison of the two periods, in every class of art, science, and literature itself. But he preserves his invincible quaintness by going off in the twenty-eighth to a very elaborate study of the Hangman (Il Boia), which readers of Joseph de Maistre should not fail to compare with the Soirées de Saint-Pétersbourg.

Tassoni deals with the general question in the same curious indirect and ironical fashion in which he handles the charms of bruttezza, and the reason why it was specially rude (let us say, though he does not) of Spenser to call the husband of Hellenore Malbecco. He begins by advancing, and even seeming to countenance, the “Modern” argument for Progress, as being the law of nature and so decisive of questa lite. But he very soon turns round, and gives reasons and instances for the much sounder doctrine of Fluctuation—not merely in general, but in regard to particular Arts. Therefore it is necessary to examine these Arts; and then he does this. Once more he becomes a “Modern” in awarding to his countrymen the palm of grammatico-critical studies. In Logic and Philosophy generally, he thinks they can match the Latins, and though they yield to the Greeks, may make some fight even with them. He will pit Guicciardini, Comines, and Giovio against any of the ancients, which is a little rash; putting Machiavelli with others in a second rank. And on the modern side of Oratory he urges, with his unconquerable unexpectedness, Peter the Hermit and John of Munster! But on the Poets this unexpectedness of his turns to the disappointing. He gives us a very unnecessary classification of Kinds, obviously in order that he may quote his own Secchia as a new kind, the Heroi-comic. But it is interesting to find him dividing the Commedia into “Heroi-satiric” for the Inferno, Heroic mixed with Hymnic for the Paradiso, and a division (not, as in the Inferno, a blend) 328of Heroic and Satiric for the Purgatory. Except on this head of questa lite, in which he is a notable forerunner of later disputants, Tassoni has little that is positively critical. And if he shows on the one hand a singularly active and inquiring spirit, such as may any day discover fresh and promising outlooks, he shows us also the risk of mere fantastic “problem”-raising, to which a century of active criticism was leading a century of Academies.[418]

Tassoni’s Petrarch-blasphemies brought him into collision with Giuseppe Aromatari, of whose original work, including his part in this battle,[419] I do not know much. Aromatari. But Aromatari was responsible, many years later, for a remarkable encyclopædia or corpus, which may very well follow the Pensieri Diversi as a pendant to Possevino’s work already mentioned, and as illustrating the learned and scholastic side. It is entitled Degli Autori del Ben Parlare,[420] and, if its grammatical and Rhetorical divisions had been succeeded by a similar collection of Poetics, it would have gone far to cover, in a certain peculiar and limited way, the entire field of criticism. As it is, not a few of its documents extend in the poetic direction. Its first volume gives the promise of an almost unique thesaurus, starting with illustrative and comparative extracts from Hesiod, Lucian, Cicero, Xenophon, &c., then giving the whole of Dante’s De Vulgari Eloquentia in the Italian, and following this with Trissino’s Castellano, Tolomei’s Cesano, a discourse of Varchi, and “Opinions” from Mutio, Doni, Dolce, Citadini, and others, all on the subject of the Vulgar Tongue. Other treatises, including Bembo’s, with less famous ones by Alunno, Delminio, and others, follow; while two whole parts are given up to Salviati’s Avvertimenti della Lingua on 329Boccaccio. Not seldom the grammatical matter touches points very important indeed to criticism, as for instance in vol. vi., where Buonmattei enters on the question (made a burning one in France by Malherbe) whether popular or literary usage is to be the standard of correctness.

The Rhetorical part has the additional interest of combining ancient and modern matter—of being, in short, a kind of compressed Rhetorici Græci et Latini with modern additions. His Degli Autori del Ben Parlare. Sometimes the texts are given simply in whole or part—Aristotle, Longinus, Hermogenes being thus treated—while an Introduction to Hermogenes by Giulio Camillo Delminio shows how strongly the authority of that master was working, and how much it had to do with the insistence on criticism by Kinds and Qualities. Sometimes a catena of authorities on particular matters is given—as in the case of Tropes and Figures, where the chain stretches from Quintilian to Mazzoni. Only specialists, probably, will care to investigate profoundly the huge commentary-paraphrase of Panigarola on Demetrius Phalereus, readjusted to the purposes of sacred Oratory, though the book had a great vogue in its day. But one turns with more interest to the work of Patrizzi on Rhetoric, much less known as it is than his Della Poetica and Della Storia. It has, however, hardly any of the interest of the Poetica, being almost entirely devoted to the subjects of the orator, and philosophical rather than literary in its handling. But this great medley of Aromatari’s shows us, better perhaps than any single book except Baillet’s, and nearly fifty years before it, the bulk and importance of the position which the critical consideration of literature was taking among literary studies.

The literary side of Boccalini’s Ragguagli di Parnasso[421] is less than the political. Boccalini and Minors. But the list of seventeenth-century treatises in Italian on critical subjects is long.[422] Some of them are difficult to procure out of Italy, and I doubt whether many are worth the trouble of hunting down. I am sorry that the work of Chiodino da Monte-Melone[423] has hitherto 330escaped me, because of the extreme beauty of the name, which would seem to qualify its author for the post of Chief Rhetorician to Queen Pintiquinestra. Pellegrino, Fioretti, Zani, Querengo, Menzini have not been or shall not be forgotten. But I have experienced, and fear again, the sort of disappointment which occurs when, for instance,[424] one is told, of Carlo Rinaldini,[425] that the third part of his Philosophia Rationalis “contains a tolerable Poetic.” One attacks the mighty double-columned folio, and finds a purely scholastic treatise of the familiar kind, beginning with Poetice, Poeta, Poesis, Poema as of old. It is impossible to say Non debes quadrillare in this fashion—the company is too ancient and venerable; but it is permissible to decline to play, on the strength of having had enough of the game already. There is a certain established conformity of propriety between times and books. At no time can a frank commentary on Aristotle be out of date or out of place; at this time the Poetics of Le Bossu and Bouhours, faulty as they are, were at any rate responsive to the form and pressure of the day. But such work as Rinaldini’s, however respectable, has neither the intrinsic excellence which conquers time, nor the fleeting but real grace of temporal congruity.

The Ragguagli di Parnasso themselves are of less importance to us for their actual critical utterances (which, as has been said, were not Boccalini’s first object) than for the extraordinary influence which they exercised on the form of criticism throughout Europe for more than a century. Influence of the Ragguagli. Suggested more or less directly by Lucian (whose enormous effect on modern European literature, though of course never missed entirely by any competent person, has never yet been fully allowed for) they hit the taste of the day straight and full. Not merely did they start the whole fleet of “Sessions of the Poets” and the like in England, but they had a great influence on the English prose Essayists of the early eighteenth century;[426] while in France even the severe Boileau paid them unacknowledged royalty. It is no uncommon experience to find that books which in this way 331create a kind of “rage” at one time, become chiefly sources of boredom at another; but Boccalini certainly illustrates the fact, in his literary portions at any rate. He deserves some credit for having made current, if he did not invent, the famous story of the choice between Guicciardini and the galleys. There is some critical appropriateness in the fable of Tasso being refused admission by Castelvetro on the alleged strength of Aristotle’s rules, of the reprimand bestowed by Apollo on the philosopher, and of his excuse that he never meant his observations for “rules” at all. To this the age might have paid more attention than it did. But one finds thinness in the fun of Justus Lipsius attacking Tacitus for impiety, and of Thrasea and Priscus being warned, as they value their stoical characters, not to go and see Vittoria Colonna and Veronica Gambara too often.

In the History of Taste as distinguished from that of Criticism the important point of the Seicento is of course that development of floridity—of Marinism—which is associated in literary history with the very term. The set of Seicentist taste.But this development was common to Italy with all Europe; and though the country still exercised a sort of prerogative influence, “Marinism” is not so much the mother as the elder, and not by so very much the elder, sister of Gongorism in Spain, of the extravagances of the age before Boileau in France, of the “metaphysical” fashion in England. It will be better to treat these in the Interchapter, both in themselves and as fastening “correctness,” by way of reaction, upon Europe.

Spain has never ranked very high in the general estimate as a contributor to European criticism: and though this estimate has not been too solidly founded, the communis sensus seems here to have exercised that mysterious power of appeal to the world-spirit which so often keeps it from going hopelessly wrong.[427] Spanish criticism—Highly ranked by Dryden? There is, 332however, one remarkable piece of testimony which, if it were a little better authenticated, would give Spanish critics a very high position as teachers. We shall see in a future chapter that Dryden (as has indeed been generally, though, until recent times, but vaguely, allowed) is himself one of the great turning-points of the critical story of Europe. Now Spence says that Bolingbroke told him that Dryden had assured him that “he got more from the Spanish critics alone than from the Italian and French and all others together.” Unfortunately Spence speaks at second-hand; and Bolingbroke, even if he really did say this, is always a Bardolphian security. Moreover, Dryden, who was not at all in the habit of concealing his indebtedness, but, on the contrary, seems to have “felt an innocent warmth” of pleasure in mustering and marshalling his authorities, quotes no Spanish authors. And the references (which are fairly numerous) to Spanish plays in the Essay of Dramatic Poesy neither quote, nor necessarily show knowledge of, Spanish critics at all. It has been thought that Dryden may have read Tirso de Molina’s Cigarrales (v. infra); and it has occurred to me that something in his attitude may have been derived from Lope’s Arte Nuevo de hacer Comedias. But I do not believe this to be at all certain, or even very probable.[428]

333Intrinsically, however, Spanish criticism before the eighteenth century, though not extraordinarily rich nor furnishing any documents of extreme importance, is interesting, and in one point almost supremely so, for circumstances if not for contents. The Origins—Villena. The trail begins fairly early, though the scent is scattered at uncommonly long intervals. A glance was made towards the close of the first volume of this book at the actual beginnings. They were due to two persons of the greatest distinction in the early fifteenth century—Enrique, Marquis(?)[429] de Villena and Master of Calatrava, of the blood royal both of Aragon and Castille, and Iñigo Lopez de Mendoza, Marquis of Santillana. The Arte de Trobar[430] of the former, a treatise on the Gay Science, was sent by him, a year before his death, in 1434, to the latter; and Santillana himself touched criticism, or at least Poetics, both in the Preface to his Proverbs, and still more in a letter to the Constable (Dom Pedro) of Portugal, written about 1455, not long before his own death, and containing observations not merely on Poetry in general, but on early Spanish poets up to his own times. This document was fortunately, and most wisely, prefixed by Sanchez to his collection of the older Spanish poets, and is easily accessible in the re-edition of Ochoa,[431] or in the Appendix to Señor Menéndez' History, vol. ii.

The Marquis begins, after compliments, by the usual generalities about poetry containing “useful things covered with a very pretty coverlet, composed, distinguished, and scanned in certain number, weight, and measure.” Santillana. So “as 334fructiferous gardens abound and give convenient fruits,” &c., &c., with Tully to give security. But for all his own very pretty coverlet of rhetoric, the Marquis talks very good sense. He is sure that verse is above prose, basing himself soundly on Isidore of Seville and his proofs from Hebrew literature, with the Greeks to follow, and Cassiodorus to back up Isidore. Then he comes to modern times—to Petrarch and Robert of Naples, to Boccaccio and John of Cyprus, quoting the De Genealogia itself, and therefore, in a very interesting way, gearing on Spanish criticism, even in these its rudiments, to Italian, then not much less rudimentary. He divides styles properly into “sublime,” “middle,” and “low,” liberally placing all those who write in Greek or Latin in the first class. The middle contains those who write in any vulgar tongue; the low those who merely botch up romances and songs for the common people, without order or rule. Dante wrote the Commedia “elegantemente,” and Boccaccio composed proses of grand eloquencia in the manner of Boethius. Santillana then shows himself well read in Provençal, French, and Catalan, as well as Italian. He refers to the Roman de la Rose and its authors, to “Michaute” (Machault), Otho de “Crantzon” (Granson), “Alen Charrotier,” whom, naturally, he much admires. He thinks the Italians surpass the French in genius, the French the Italians in art. Then he turns to Spain, and beginning with those who have written in the Provençal style, comes to Gallegan, Castilian, &c., later, mentions the chief poets, gives the metres in which they have written, and ends with a (mis)quotation of Horace[432] and a shower of classical allusions—among others to aquellas dueñas que en torno de la fuente Elicon incesantemente danzan. For even then the modern confusion of the Mount and the Fount had begun. The piece is, if not very advanced criticism, at any rate an early and interesting critical glance over European poetry in the Romance tongues.

Villena, as his title shows, and Santillana to some extent, had been considering Catalan and Galician as the chief poetic media 335for Spaniards; it is different with Juan del Encina, who, in 1496,[433] prefixed an Arte to his Cancionero nearly half a century after Santillana wrote, and almost as long after an earlier Cancionero, that of Baena, the compiler of which does not seem to have been tempted to criticism. Encina. The nine chapters of this deal with the origin of Castilian poetry, the distinction between the art of poetry and the arte de trobar, while both have an art; the necessities of the trobador, feet, consonance and assonance, verses and couplets, poetic “colours,” &c., and a general conclusion on writing and reading poetry. The book shows a certain Italian influence which distinguishes it from earlier work; but which, when that Italian influence had been repeated in stronger dose, seemed to later generations insufficient and out of date. Still, it is interesting, and earlier than anything of the kind in vernacular Italian.

Another half-way house may be found in the interesting Diálogo de La Lengua or de Las Lenguas[434] of Juan de Valdés, which has even been called “an important monument of literary criticism.” Valdés. It is rather, however, linguistic than literary, though the author deserves to rank with other national heroes of the time for his strenuous support of the vernacular, which he thought a more “corrupted” representative of Latin than Italian, and respecting which he held the odd but characteristically Renaissance notion that Greek, not Basque, was its remoter ancestor. He mentions the romances and the Celestina.

But the regular course of technical and elaborate Spanish criticism does not begin, after these long preliminary stages, till quite the close of the sixteenth century. The beginning of regular Criticism. Humanist Rhetoricians. The earlier course of that century has indeed supplied Señor Menéndez with a 336tolerably fair herd of humanist rhetoricians to fill the ninety pages of his ninth chapter. The list is headed by Antonio de Nebrija (Nebrissensis), De Artis Rhetoricæ compendiosa coaptatione ex Aristotele Cicerone et Quintiliano, in 1529. But the only names of much interest that appear in it are those of the famous Luis Vives, disciple of Erasmus and of Oxford, with his anti-Ciceronianism, and with at least some admission (the passage is quoted by Señor Menéndez at vol. iii. on p. 226 from the De causis Corruptarum Artium), that it does not matter in what language a man writes in so far as faults and impurities of diction and the duty of avoiding them are concerned; and of the equally famous preacher Luis de Granada, with his Rhetorica Ecclesiastica, a good deal later. Still, the metrical Rhetoric (1569) of Arias Montano, that “Lope of Latin verse,” a piece of didactic much more spirited and really poetical than Vida’s Poetic, on which no doubt it is modelled; and the vigorous if mistaken scholasticism of Francesco Sanchez (“El Brocense”), in his attempt to subject Rhetoric entirely to Logic, deserve some notice. So, perhaps, does Alfonso Garcia Matamoros, who, though Señor Menéndez conscientiously suspects him of not being very original, stumbled upon a remarkable anticipation of Buffon in the definition Est stylus habitus orationis, a cujusque hominis natura fluens. This is a slight but distinct advance on the earlier one of Fox Morcillo, De Imitatione (1544), which gives it as something quæ vel pro ingenio cujusquam, vel rei, quæ in questionem vocatur, ratione varietur. These writers, however, seem (except El Brocense, who dealt on more than one occasion with the Horatian Art) to have given little or no attention to Poetics, and in fact to have allowed themselves to drift a good deal to leeward of the purely literary side of Rhetoric altogether. When the ship bore up again for this side, the Spaniards, like everybody else in Europe without exception, took the Italians for their schoolmasters; and they might seem all the more certain to be docile pupils in that their poetical practice—their practice indeed in all sorts of regular writing—had long been under the same influence. Boscan had more or less deliberately Italianated 337Spanish poetry[435] half a century before Rengifo,[436] and Pinciano, and La Cueva, in the last decade of the sixteenth century and the first of the seventeenth, began to theorise. At the same time there was a very important point of difference between Spain and all other European nations, except to some extent England. In the contents of the Cancioneros—perhaps not in actual form very old, but stretching back by tradition and association to the very blending-time of Goth, and Cantabrian, and Latin—and in the drama which had been so rapidly maturing from Naharro to Lope de Vega, the Spaniards had two mighty, popular, and intensely anti-"regular" forms of literary composition. The critical “dependence” therefore—the point to be fought out—was, “Which was to prevail?”

Mr Spingarn’s thesis, that translation of the Epistle to the Pisos is the invariable prelude of original critical work, completes its proofs, as far as the Latin races are concerned, by the version of Espinel which appeared in 1591, and was followed in the very next year by Rengifo’s Arte Poética Española. Poetics. Rengifo. Of the former there is little to say, for though Espinel was a man of literary gift (he was the author, it may be excusable to remind the reader, of Marcos de Obregón, and so a slight, though only a slight, creditor of Le Sage), he did not add anything original to his translation. The latter has been sometimes rather unkindly spoken of by those who do not like formal Arts of Poetry. Those, on the other hand, who have weak places in their hearts for such things may give Rengifo shelter therein. He reminds one at very first sight of his Italian originals in the comely small quarto of his format—the book-size of all others which retains a certain dignity without entirely forfeiting the benefit of the Archpriest of Hita’s celebration of dueñas pequeñas: he has a beautiful folding plate of a 338Labyrinto—one of the artificial forms which are dear because they maddened the eighteenth century—and he gives a large Sylva or rhyming dictionary. I do not know that there is much else to be said for him, but he is a symptom.[437] So, some twenty years later is, on the other side, the severe Cascales,[438] who in his Tablas Poéticas[439] lays it down that “if any part of a fable can be changed without loss, this fable is not well managed.” There was a contemporary of Cascales in a country which loved not Spain, neither was loved of her, who would have changed you every part of every one of his fables, and left the versions so that you could not tell which was the better.

Some years after Rengifo came Pinciano, and ten years later the Spanish attempt to rival Vida and Vauquelin in the Ejemplar Poético of Juan de La Cueva. Pinciano. The two are opposed on the point which was rapidly becoming the burning question of Spanish literary criticism, but which was never thoroughly faced in Spain. The great national drama—in main part, if not in every respect, Romantic to the core—was making progress every day; but so was the theory that you were to follow the ancients. Alfonso Lopez, otherwise “El Pinciano,” did the latter diligently in his Filosofía Antigua 339Poética,[440] which, besides the authorities indicated in the title, owed much to the Italian school.

Pinciano[441] is set extraordinarily high by the Historian of Spanish criticism, who thinks him “the only humanist of the sixteenth century who presents a complete literary system,” contrasts him (I own that this gives me pause) with the “intolerable pedantries” of Castelvetro, and calls him plumply “an excellent critic.” The quotations advanced, though, according to Señor Menéndez' admirable custom with authors difficult of access, they are plentifully given, will perhaps hardly justify this praise. Pinciano thinks that “the soul of poetry is the fable”; that metre is not necessary, though it “perfects imitation”; that imitation itself must have verisimilitude; that poetry is superior to metaphysic; that it ranges over all the arts and sciences; that it gives things in a new form, makes them new to the world; that a perfectly organised fable is like a perfectly organised animal; that it is absurd for a hero to be born, grow up, become bearded, marry, &c., all in one piece. He prefers the probable-impossible to the improbable-possible, disapproves of classical metres, and so forth—all of which we have, I think, heard before. Señor Menéndez attributes to him altísimo entendimiento crítico for rejecting the common (and certainly absurd enough) division of comedy and tragedy by the happy or unhappy ending, and vesting the comic element in Ridicule. And he winds up by constituting Pinciano, with Cascales and Gonzales de Salas, “the luminous triad of our preceptists of the good age.”

Recurrence to, and study of, the book itself as given by Señor Peña will not, I think, remove the doubts about this high estimate of the Filosofía which even Señor Menéndez' own quotations may have started. It is a book of much learning, ingenuity, and labour, the somewhat non-natural 340form of which (the recounting in letters to a certain Don Gabriel by El Pinciano[442] of conversations between himself and two friends, Hugo and Fadrique) may, like much else in it, be due to Italian influence. That of such writers as Fracastoro is obvious in the philosophical aloofness of the first Epistle-dialogue, De la Felicidad Humana, in which the nature of virtue, the character of the Pagan divinities, and many other solemn things are discussed, with some curious ones, such as whether nobleza can be predicated of Lais either for her beauty or her eminence in an oficio deshonesto. It is Don Gabriel’s answer which deflects the subject with some sharpness into una Arte Poética en romance, and this, beginning in the next letter, occupies the rest of the book. The divisions are pretty usual: first, the general qualities of, and objections to, Poetry; then its nature, its different kinds, the Fable, Poetic diction, metre, tragedy, and comedy; dithyrambic, epic, minor poetry; and lastly, “Actors.” Pinciano calls these divisions modestly enough Fragmentos, but no just exception can be taken to them on the ground of scrappiness. The book is methodical enough; its aperçus (as, for instance, on furor poeticus and poetic diction) are often acute, and its expression not seldom has the quaint raciness of Spanish.[443] But it still “sticks in generals”; it still holds those generals to have been settled once for all of old; and it still gives no sign of any catholic examination of actual poetry.

On the other hand, La Cueva,[444] though meticulous enough, and citing with high reverence[445] not merely Aristotle and Horace, 341but Scaliger himself, Vida, Minturno, Viperano, and others, is, on the drama at least, and especially on comedy, an utter contemner of the ancient doctrine. La Cueva. My friend Mr Hannay’s pithy statement[446] of this Spanish point of view has already commended itself to good judges,[447] and it seems to sum up the whole matter. “The theatre was to imitate nature and to please. Poetry was to imitate the Italians, and satisfy the orthodox but minute critic.” There had been something of this in Castelvetro; there was more in the Spaniards, and it was fatal to them as critics.

Carvallo.

Of the authors of this group with whom I am myself acquainted, none seems to me to stand higher than Gonzales de Salas on the Aristotelian-Senecan side; while few exhibit rehashings of the common stuff to be found in all the Italian books more strikingly than Carvallo in his Cisne de Apolo.[448]

Gonzales de Salas,[449] on the contrary, strikes me as having shown distinct and original critical power. Gonzales de Salas. A foreigner is not likely to be greatly disturbed, even if he be a better Spanish scholar than I am, by the “palpable” darkness,[450] the “accumulation of obscurity and troublesomeness” in style, with which Señor Menéndez reproaches Salas. It is an odd thing, but might be paralleled elsewhere, that the foreigner, who does not know what the man ought to have said in order to convey his meaning properly, can, in nearly all languages, arrive at that meaning more easily than the native, who is “put off” by eccentricity and barbarisms. Words, for instance, like lucifugas and parasangas, which Don Marcelino holds up to special reproach, are to an Englishman, with his Virgil and his Xenophon in his head, perhaps easier reading than some of the bluest-blooded words of pure Spanish. The critic is further 342enraged by Salas’s devotion to Seneca, whose Troades